Music that creates Itself

[1]

We’ve all studied Charles Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest in school but most of us must have thought that we would never be in a position to see the effects of natural selection in a way that can be easily understood by many.

Two professors of biology and informatics at the Imperial College of Science were thinking of ways to teach evolution to students in a novel and powerful way, when they stumbled on the idea of Darwin-tunes.
The idea is extremely simple — a computer program generates files containing random sounds- people vote on the sounds- the number of ‘likes’ is considered the fitness of an any sound sample. ‘Unfit’ samples are discarded and the fittest ones are carried for generations with small mutations as the cycle continues.
When this algorithm was allowed to run for thousands of generations, something amazing happened.
The sounds coalesced into music with only indirect human input (likes and dislikes) being fed into a computer program. You can go to the regularly updated Darwin Tunes website to check what has happened in the 7000 or so generations.
At generation 0 you find a bunch of eerie discordant sounds; by generation 150 it becomes a sombre melody; it develops schizophrenia at generation 250 before picking its final direction. Perhaps not surprisingly — for a tune built out of the opinion of the masses, the final piece of music sounds very much like a pop tune. All published generations are available for download for free.