Thenatural selectionit is not only useful to understand how species evolve and adapt. Biologists from Imperial College London (United Kingdom) have used the principles of Charles Darwin to create a computer program that “composes” the “perfect pop melody”, as published in the magazinePNASin its latest edition. Theprogram produces music from noise without the need for a composer, taking into account only the musical opinions of 7,000 users of the DarwinTunes.com website. The result is a melody full of rhythms and chords that also contains elements of traditional music.
With this project, the scientists tried to test a theory according to which cultural changes in language, music and art evolve according to the principles of natural selection, similar to how a living being evolves. ? Everyone knows that music is made from the contributions of many geniuses: Bach passed the torch to Beethoven, who gave it to Brahms ?, the researchers recall.
The algorithm created for this purpose randomly produced loops of music of a few seconds in length that users scored on a scale of 1 to 5. The ten most voted were “paired” and became the “parents” of 20 new compositions, that by recombination, mutations, etc. they gave rise to a new generation. As in nature,the songs that were best adapted survived, that is, the most listened to.
Through this method they created several generations of? Musical evolution ?, verifying that the melodies obtained improved as time passed. So far, DarwinTunes.com has already spawned 2,513 sound generations.
