Ah well, yes, actually there is plenty of scope for audio white space in the DarwinTunes GP representation. Loops do tend to be rather busy though - could be a consequence of either selection or biases in the representation. Thanks for your interest!

exactly, and one more thing - the selection is pretty close natural selection because multiple raters in isolation provide the feedback.

Obviously the music stays fairly saccharine (but now less so than I had imagined) but with enough people you could speciate/split into sub-populations and get more edgy (literally!) music.

But there's more than one listener - they are generally not in contact with each other - so the selection is not really directional in the sense of one person breeding dogs or roses. It's pretty close to a natural selection environment.

Thanks, I had a stab at it (you meant this comment?)

Well yes, it's easy to knock out some evo-music toy and move on. We were less interested in the toy and more interested in what happens when you let music evolve in an environment of as many human listeners as we can muster.

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.

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.

Yeah, you just follow the roads and find all kinds of weird stuff: http://g.co/maps/xwk8j

This one (the first image in the Wired article) seems to be exactly the same dimensions as the image tiles - zoom out until you see different "vintage" images and you'll see what I mean. Could just be an artifact. The others look real though.

This is a nice tool for viewing the cross section (altitude) of an arbitrary path drawn on a google map:
http://www.geocontext.org/publ/2010/04/profiler/en/

One response on Twitter was that the masses would vote for hanging, and other kneejerk responses.

Maybe that's democracy. Maybe there are workarounds. You could have to show some basic knowledge and understanding of a subject before voting (like clicking through a EULA...).

Dennis Ritchie

Totally agree, apart from the beating to death bit!