It's not completely novel, no. Google weren't the first to do web search either
An incomplete list of related work is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_music
Our goal here is to look in detail at the evolutionary dynamics and mechanisms, as well as just answering the basic question "does it still work if loads of people provide the fitness ratings?"
Sorry about that.
Although note that my original submission had the New Scientist link in a more obvious place:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1136438/Music-by-natural-selection
It did seem odd to me why the editor changed the links that way. Conspiracy?
Thanks for the info. I'll mention that to the journalist at New Scientist. I've got adblock so I don't see it.
It must be a DNS hack because I'm really not seeing it! Can you give some more info?
I was able to do some rating for a while, and I think the results are fairly cool, but it may not produce anything very interesting for a couple reasons.
The first is that there isn't strong enough evolutionary pressure. There are too many people rating with very different opinions of what sounds good. I think it would be much more interesting to create different channels. Classical, jazz, ambient, electronica, whatever. It's still a very broad definition but not so much that our ratings aren't just noise.
You're right, and this is why we wanted to do the experiment. Nearly a month ago we had 120 Imperial College students do 250 ratings each for us over a week. We replicated the experiment 3 times (40 students per population) and assumed that these students would have a mix of musical and cultural backgrounds. We got 75 generations out of it, and the results were much more musical than the random material we started with, but now we realise that 200+ generations is where it's at!
Secondly, the algorithms used to generate the music are really important. I couldn't find any information on it, but the way the notes are put together seems fairly random. I think it's important to stick to what we do know sounds good... to an extent. For example, the gene could contain information on which way to move the current note, rather than the specific note. That way you could limit it to 2 or 3 steps and lay it over a scale or mode. The willy nillyness of it will guarantee that we pick 'safe' consonant sounding harmonies. 5ths and 4ths with beep boop melodies.
Very interesting though, I can't wait to see what happens with this.
Absolutely, the choice of 4/4 time signature, 12 note scale, tempo etc all have a big effect. As do the types of synths, effects (there's reverb but no delay), quantisation (there's no way to get triplets, for example), no glissando, the list goes on.
We tried to boil it down to the simplest and least arbitrary implementation possible, but that was an infinite task!
And yes, a lot of it does seem to be picking the "non-rubbish" loops, although recently (post-slashdot) I've been hearing some quite adventurous stuff.
Your thoughts are welcome on the Facebook Group
Head to Evolectronica when the slashdot dust has settled. I'm planning to give it a make-over and some banging new evo-tunes.
This is an academic site and there are no paid ads. It hasn't been compromised either, as far as I can tell.
I tweaked some Apache config with help from the hosting provider, removed some unnecessary audio content from the front page, and it seems to be responding better now...
And it's sounding sweet!
I'm the site admin. Sorry for the inability to withstand slashdotting. This was supposed to only go in "Idle"...
You can get to the actual evolving music bit
via this ugly EC2 URL
That link will not work in a few days from now (when I let go of the machine). Too stingy to pay for an elastic IP
cheers,
Bob.
We had one of these and it needed rebooting for almost every print (after about 2 years reliable service).
then I bricked it trying to upgrade the firmware (I knew that was a risk).
The relevant HP forum thread is long and full of irate customers.
Thanks Anonymous Cowardon! (as rendered in FF 3.0.x)
Using FF 3.0.x, I've seen "Anonymous Cowardon" (should be "Anonymous Coward on") for a long time now and really you guys should fix it!
I saw this in the wild a few weeks ago. I had a google email alert running for my bank, which pointed me to a page which was blog-like but when you looked closer it was completely auto-generated gibberish. They had built the whole thing based on a list of banks and insurance companies. As it was under envsci.rutgers.edu I guessed they had been compromised.
I reported it to the webmaster and I see that it is gone (both from Google's index and the server). Not a word of thanks though. How long does that take...
Maybe someone here will give me a medal instead?
BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of `Scientific Creationism'.
