EvoMusic

Musical Gene Pool .....Evolving Structure in Liquid Music

Read the chapter:

"Evolving Structure in Liquid Music" , by JJ Ventrella
..to be published soon in "The Art of Artificial Evolution", Natural Computing Series, Springer, 2007, editors Penousal Machado and Juan Romero.

ABSTRACT:
A software application called “Musical Gene Pool” is described. It was designed to evolve non-linear music from an initial random soup of sounds, which play continuously. Most music evolutionary systems to date require the user to select for musical aspects in a piecemeal fashion, whereas this system is experienced as continuous music throughout the entire process, as follows: a human listener gives fitness rewards after sounds (organisms) emerge from the gene pool, take turns playing, and return back to the pool.

Organisms start out unicellular (one sound), but as the listener selectively rewards random sequences deemed more musical than others, some organisms join up to form larger, multicellular organisms – which become phrases or extended musical gestures. Genetic operators of splitting, death, replication, and mutation occur in the gene pool among rewarded organisms. This results in gradual evolution of structure as the music continues to play. This emerges in response to the listener’s own internal emerging musical language, based on accumulated musical memory.

This structure is liquid – continually able to flow and re-arrange to allow serendipity. While there is a limit to organism length (duration of phrases), it is proposed that the interactive scheme could be adjusted to evolve increasingly larger organisms, and hence, longer musical passages. These would essentially be mobile chunks of linear music with self-similarity in their structures – revealing the histories of their evolution.

Music
"...is a fluid reality. The only thing that primitive polyphony, classical
counterpoint, tonal harmony, twelve-tone serial music, and electronic
music have in common is the principle of giving form to noise in
accordance with changing syntactic structure".
- Jaques Attali
Noise p. 10

" Perhaps most important is the stance that John Cage encouraged us to take when thinking about music, as “purposeless play” – and so as with the Musical Gene Pool, the listener is encouraged to flow with the random chance that is at the bottom of the pool, and to suspend expectations and desires of how the music “should” come about. Taking this stance can have the best results, acknowledging that the listener and the Gene Pool are equal collaborators in the creation of the music. Using a bottom-up attitude to music generation invites serendipity, which is the creative engine of the Musical Gene Pool. "

Would you like to be able to save your evolved musical gene pools into a file, so that you can play them later? So would I! If you or someone you know is experienced in Java servlets, mysql, web applcations, and other related stuff, send email to: Jeffrey@Ventrella.com