Who needs composers when you’ve got … Darwin! Robert MacCallum and Armand Leroi from Imperial College London wondered if music could “evolve” out of short bits of noises.
So the duo created DarwinTunes, where thousands of humans participate in the natural selection process:
The DarwinTunes tracks are all 8-second-long loops, each encoded by a ‘digital genome’ – a program that determines which notes are used, where they’re placed, the instruments, the tempo, and so on. The genomes of two parent loops can shuffle together in random ways to produce daughter loops, which also develop small random mutations. This mimics the way in which living things mate and mutate. It also mimics the way in which composers merge musical styles together, while inventing new motifs.
Click the pic to find out more.