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DarwinTunes Iterates, Mixes And Culls To Create Listenable Music From Noise

Posted by timothy on from the soon-there-will-be-cover-bands dept.

Shipud writes "A collaboration between a group in Imperial College and Media Interaction group in Japan yielded a really cool website: darwintunes.org. The idea is to apply Darwinian-like selection to music. Starting form a garble, after several generations producing something that is actually melodic and listen-able. The selective force being the appeal of the tune to the listener. From the paper published [Monday] (abstract) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 'At any given time, a DarwinTunes population has 100 loops, each of which is 8 s long. Consumers ratethem on a five-point scale ("I can't stand it" to "I love it") as they are streamed in random order. When 20 loops have been rated,truncation selection is applied whereby the best 10 loops are paired, recombine, and have two daughters each.' Note that in 2009 the creators of darwintunes harnessed the power of Slashdot to help 'evolve' their site."

8 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Darwins evolution principals actually lead to t by davidwr · · Score: 3, Funny

    first post

    Ah, so this is what "Starting form a garble" means.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  2. Excellent! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Going to grab this software, have it run 24/7 on a Beowulf cluster of servers filled with GPUs. Eventually I will own the copyright in EVERY piece of music not yet in existence!

  3. So it's... by a90Tj2P7 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Survival of the phattest?

  4. Re:Seriously... by jgtg32a · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No you're not. However, I have found that /. has better conversations than other sites.

  5. Silence is golden by Kozz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Musicians also know that musical compositions benefit from the appropriate amount of silence between notes. If this algorithm were tweaked a bit to include some relative silence here and there, I think it would help the "listenable" factor. Take the final tune for example, and imagine a four-count measure that contained only one note or instrument (or even bass drum-like sound) playing eighth notes on beats 1,2,3,4. It'd create some anticipation, I think. This is the electronic equivalent of "white guy syndrome" -- too many notes!

    --
    I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
    1. Re:Silence is golden by maccallr · · Score: 3, Informative

      No way are we billing it as machine generated music - the PNAS paper title and website tagline are pretty clear about the role of the consumer/listener.

      We thought it would be interesting to test just how far listener-selection can get. Seems like quite far, but in its current state it's obviously not music that will provoke a particularly profound response. This tallies with your comments about the music industry.

  6. Re:Original Article from 2009 by maccallr · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah that 2009 post was my doing - this new one is "organic". The main thing we've added since then is the re-rating of the loops to assess the increase or otherwise of musical appeal through the generations, and to investigate why it slowed down.

  7. I have an idea by kelemvor4 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Apply this to top 40 songs and turn them into music as well...