DarwinTunes - Evolution of Music by Public Choice

The natural world – creatures, plants, infections – is the result of Darwinian evolution by natural selection, i.e., the gradual process of (biological) traits become either more or less common in a population based on the success of the organism carrying these traits. This process, repeated for two billion years, has created the vast diversity of life on earth.
The same process can be also observed in human society where cultural artifacts – words, songs, images, ideas – are constantly remixed and reinterpreted by people. A reinterpretation is an imperfect copy and therefore a “mutation”. Thus, the variety of our culture is the result of a cultural evolution.
In order to examine the underlying mechanism of cultural evolution, Robert M. MacCalluma, Matthias Mauch, Austin Burta, and Armand M. Leroia constructed a Darwinian music engine consisting of a population of short audio loops that sexually reproduce and mutate.
The selection is based on human feedback via a webpage that implements the remixing of tunes as a game. By remixing your tune with others, the other parent gets a score point. Your goal is to make an attractive tune - the more often you get remixed, the more points you have.

In 2010, researchers from the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt released a similar system where people could vote for recombinations of music tunes.  

Links:

• http://game.darwintunes.org 
• #LetsPlayDarwinTunes on Twitter (informs whenever a player joins)
• Robert M. MacCalluma, Matthias Mauchb, Austin Burta, and Armand M. Leroia. Evolution of music by public choice.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2012.
• Self-Organizing Networked Systems. Mozart meets Darwin - Creating music by evolution. November 2010

POEtic-Cubes: Self-organizing Art

POEtic-Cubes is a physical installation consisting of 9 autonomous robots which are able to react to stimuli coming from its direct environment. Stimuli are either induced from other robots or come from people interacting with the robots. Although every robot has the same program, different stimuli and interaction with each other leads to an emergent process where the robots self-organize into an overall organism consisting of 9 cells. A similar effect of differentiation of behavior despite of identical programming can be found in the robot soccer example.

Nice art, nice robots, although a bit loud :-)

• Raquel Paricio, Juan  Manuel Moreno. POEtic-cubes: attention and emergence. Bio-inspired hardware for art installations. artnodes 9, 2009 (in spanish language)

Mozart meets Darwin now on Android

Our experiment "Mozart meets Darwin" (see my previous blog article about it for details) is online again. You can take part in the experiment by voting using the Flash application below. We also provide a version for Android mobile phones now (the download is free). Please spread the word and tell your friends: we expect many votes in order to make this work.
I will provide an analysis of the results after a few weeks.

• Project page about Mozart meets Darwin experiment
• Android App: Mozart meets Darwin (needs Android Version 2.2 or above)
• www.demesos.tk - Our research project (funded by Lakeside Labs)

Mozart meets Darwin - Creating music by evolution

Mozart meets Darwin is a case study where we try to evolve a piece of music, a simple melody. To evolve something, we need a model of the canditates, a method to mutate a candidate (that is apply some random perturbations), a method to recombine two parent candidates into similar children canditates, and a way to assess the fitness of a result. Using the music notes as DNA, we came up with solutions for mutation and recombination. But the assessment of the quality cannot be done by the machine - that is where we need you to indicate which piece of music is better than the other.




In the application above, you can listen to sets of five examples and rank them according to your personal preference. A computer program on a server will gather the rankings until it has sufficient input to decide how to evolve to the next generation. Mutation and recombination will be the "creativity" of the computer program. Please rank a few sets and get an impression of the approach. If you come back later, you will notice that the music pieces have improved, typically towards the overall music taste - hopefully you like it!
The results will be posted later under the GNU FDL license - so you can use the evolved melody in a song if you like.

Self-organizing music

Bacterial Orchestra by Olle Corméer and Martin Lübcke is a self-organizing evolutionary music installation. Several hardware units (cells) listen to their surroundings and pick up sounds, eventually integrating them into their own 'genom'. By analyzing the rythm, each cell decides which tunes to keep and which (possibly mis-sounding) tunes to drop. Thus, over time a strange but interesting music evolves.
As a follow-up to the Bacterial Orchestra, the group has now brought their approach to smartphones where each cell lives on a mobile phone.
That way different people can gather with their mobiles and together create a musical organism. It will evolve in the same way as Bacterial Orchestra, but the social component will give it additional extra dynamics.

• About Bacterial Orchestra at the authors web page
• About Public Epidmic No 1 at the authors web page.
• Video on test of Public Epidmic No 1
• Download their App for Apple iPhone