Contact: Simon Levey
s.levey@imperial.ac.uk
44-20-7594-6702
Imperial College London

On the Origin of Music by Means of Natural Selection

Caption: Do away with the DJ and scrap the composer. A computer program powered by Darwinian natural selection and the musical tastes of 7,000 website users may be on the way to creating a perfect pop tune, according to new research published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Scientists from Imperial College London have devised a way of producing music from noises without a composer. They programmed a computer to produce loops of random sounds and analyse the opinions of musical consumers, who decided which ones they liked. The result is music filled with many of the sophisticated chords and rhythms familiar from modern songs. Listen to Dr Bob MacCallum explaining the evolution of evolution of musical loops created by DarwinTunes, accompanied by a selection of loops from the website http://dawrintunes.org

Credit: Robert MacCallum, Imperial College London

Usage Restrictions: None