Rockin' the Darwin Beat

[Ansgar Seraph]

Apparently, some enterprising researchers are using Darwinian techniques to evolve music from simple, random loops to more complex, pleasing tracks. The authors of "DarwinTunes" use a "digital genome" in their tracks and "mate" different tracks together, with the daughter tracks inheriting random qualities from parent tracks. As "Discover Magazine" puts it:

Tunes without composers: music naturally evolves on DarwinTunes. Discover Magazine. 2012.06.18

The experiment began with 100 randomly generated loops. On the DarwinTunes website, listeners could listen to these and rate them on a five-point scale, from “I can’t stand it” to “I love it”. Every time 20 loops were rated, the top 10 pair off, mate with each other to produce two daughters, and die. At any time, there are only 100 loops in the total population.

To date the loops have been evolving for 3,060 generations, and over 50,000 of them have been born. By taking loops from DarwinTunes’ entire history and asking volunteers to rate them, MacCallum and Leroi showed that they became more appealing with time. For example, they were more likely to contain chords found in Western music and they contained more complex rhythms. “We hoped for slightly more “advanced” music, but were very happy with the results,” says MacCallum.

© source where applicable

Perhaps most interesting, the selection ability hits a plateau some 500 generations in, similar to the "good enough" nature of biological selection.

Check it out and join in the selection process here!

—Sam

[Little Shepherd]

I listened for a few minutes. That was very unpleasant. How many more generations do you think it will be until the loops stop sounding like crappy game show music?

[Ansgar Seraph]

I listened for a few minutes. That was very unpleasant. How many more generations do you think it will be until the loops stop sounding like crappy game show music?

Never! This just goes to show you that the evolution of music stopped at game shows. Everything past that is irreducibly complex.

[lucaspa]

Welcome to another demonstrationg that Darwinian selection is an unintelligent process that gives design. Humans here acted as the "environment".

[MooseOnTheLoose]

Oh I see. Intelligent, sentient beings set up a system whereby other intelligent, sentient beings could influence that system to produce a result.

Very Darwinistic I'm sure.

Ever heard of "Berra's Blunder"?

[lucaspa]

Oh I see. Intelligent, sentient beings set up a system whereby other intelligent, sentient beings could influence that system to produce a result.

In this case, sentient beings simply mimicked what goes on in nature. In nature the environment influences populations to produce a result. Humans here just acted as the environment. However, humans did not compose the music, did they? No, the music was composed by natural selection.

If I mix organic acids and alcohols together, did I make the ketones that result? NO! My sentience is not part of the reaction. Same here. The people did not compose the music: Darwinian selection did.

[phank]

In fact, genetic algorithms (GAs) are in increasingly common use to find practical solutions to gnarly engineering problems. In situations where evolutionary methods and simulations are helpful, two things are true of the results generally: (1) They work better than any engineer could achieve by normal computational or analytic methods; and (2) they are nontrivial, surprising, completely unexpected. Not what anyone would have thought of, and utterly nonintuitive.

Nevertheless, as one might expect, this powerful demonstration of the capabilities of evolutionary processes is rejected by creationists on the very grounds as here - since humans wrote the simulation, it only proves the power of "intelligent design" - even though nobody designed the solution, or ever would have.

Of course, if Moose were to try to demonstrate gravity by dropping a brick on his foot, he'd claim to be sentient and this would "prove" gravity is not natural.