Monday (6/18) on the BBC News site, Rebecca Morelle writes, “You might think that creating the perfect piece of music—whether it’s a classical great, jazz masterpiece or pop hit—is all down to the composer’s talent, flair or even genius. Not so, according to Armand Leroi from Imperial College London. ‘What we are trying to find out is whether you need a composer to make music,’ says the professor of evolutionary developmental biology. … ‘We believe music evolves by a fundamentally Darwinian process—so we wanted to test that idea.’ Enter Dr. Bob MacCallum, mosquito researcher at Imperial College London by day, creator of DarwinTunes by night. … To begin with, the computer program randomly churned out two short loops of noise. … Then, as in nature, the program let the two original loops to ‘breed’, to recombine and mix up their material, with some random mutations thrown in for good measure, to create four new loops. Those four went on to ‘reproduce’ to create 16 new loops, and so on—until 100 random tunes were in the musical mixing pot. At which point, the public were brought in. … Those tunes that were detested were thrown out. But the more popular ones were kept and allowed to ‘breed’ to create a new generation of songs. … Despite some limitations, Prof Leroi says the results from DarwinTunes confirmed his suspicions. ‘You can evolve music without a composer,’ he explains.”
Posted June 19, 2012
