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Comment Re:my thoughts (Score 1) 164

by maccallr (#30525304) Attached to: Music By Natural Selection

Thanks for the comments. I'll take them one by one (while I wait for the algorithm to tick over to 250 generations).

1. to give a fair comparison with the hand-picked better sounding loops given in all the subsequent "tasters", the time=zero loops are also hand-picked. Rest assured that most of them sounded pretty horrific. Yes we did set a minimum amount of complexity (I think it was at least 8 different "tracks") in the initial Adam and Eve, but then let them evolve under no selection for a long time.

2. yes we have to keep it short so that rating can happen in this lifetime :-) I have put several tracks together for my own projects (just me doing the ratings, and using pre-recorded samples as well as evolved synths) - here's the best example. I'll probably put something from DarwinTunes together over the holidays (prob using consistently highly rated loops from the slashdot surge)

3. there are no constraints on harmonies or anything, however the "palette" of notes is defined once (all evolved from random) and then the notes are picked from the palette. Mutations to the palette are going to be rare (because defining it takes many fewer "genes" than defining all the music) - hence the good agreement between loops.

4. yep, there have been scientific studies showing herd behaviour in music "selection". The rest of what you say can't be denied, and that's what we're interested in and why we're doing the experiment.

5. no it's real - but I didn't know about the tenori-on, so thanks for the heads up on that :-)

nearly at 250 generations now...

Comment Re:Responding faster for me now... (Score 1) 164

by maccallr (#30523022) Attached to: Music By Natural Selection

For the last time...

darwintunes.org has no ads at all - it's an academic experiment website, it would be inappropriate. Even my slightly more commercial evolectronica.com doesn't have ads. From my experience that would just be a colossal waste of time and turn people away.

What newscientist.com (or perhaps DNS hackers) do with their ads is nothing to do with me!

And finally, it was Slashdot who made the New Scientist link look like the main link for the article, not me! See my original submission:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1136438/Music-by-natural-selection

Comment Re:Not a novel idea (Score 1) 164

by maccallr (#30521982) Attached to: Music By Natural Selection

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?"

Comment Re:A good idea in theory (Score 1) 164

by maccallr (#30518056) Attached to: Music By Natural Selection

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 :-)

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