Evolutionary music is the audio counterpart to

evolutionary art Evolutionary art is a branch of generative art, in which the artist does not do the work of constructing the artwork, but rather lets a system do the construction. In evolutionary art, initially generated art is put through an iterated process o ...

, whereby

algorithmic music Algorithmic composition is the technique of using algorithms to create music. Algorithms (or, at the very least, formal sets of rules) have been used to compose music for centuries; the procedures used to plot voice-leading in Western counterp ...

is created using an

evolutionary algorithm In computational intelligence (CI), an evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a subset of evolutionary computation, a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. An EA uses mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as reproduct ...

. The process begins with a

population Population typically refers to the number of people in a single area, whether it be a city or town, region, country, continent, or the world. Governments typically quantify the size of the resident population within their jurisdiction using a ...

of individuals which by some means or other produce audio (e.g. a piece, melody, or loop), which is either initialized randomly or based on human-generated music. Then through the repeated application of computational steps analogous to biological

selection Selection may refer to: Science * Selection (biology), also called natural selection, selection in evolution ** Sex selection, in genetics ** Mate selection, in mating ** Sexual selection in humans, in human sexuality ** Human mating strateg ...

, recombination and

mutation In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Viral genomes contain either DNA or RNA. Mutations result from errors during DNA replication, DNA or viral repl ...

the aim is for the produced audio to become more musical. Evolutionary sound synthesis is a related technique for generating sounds or synthesizer instruments. Evolutionary music is typically generated using an interactive evolutionary algorithm where the

fitness function {{no footnotes, date=May 2015 A fitness function is a particular type of objective function that is used to summarise, as a single figure of merit, how close a given design solution is to achieving the set aims. Fitness functions are used in geneti ...

is the user or audience, as it is difficult to capture the aesthetic qualities of music computationally. However, research into automated measures of musical quality is also active. Evolutionary computation techniques have also been applied to

harmonization In music, harmonization is the chordal accompaniment to a line or melody: "Using chords and melodies together, making harmony by stacking scale tones as triads". A harmonized scale can be created by using each note of a musical scale as a root ...

and accompaniment tasks. The most commonly used evolutionary computation techniques are genetic algorithms and

genetic programming In artificial intelligence, genetic programming (GP) is a technique of evolving programs, starting from a population of unfit (usually random) programs, fit for a particular task by applying operations analogous to natural genetic processes to t ...

History

NEUROGEN
Gibson & Byrne, 1991
employed a genetic algorithm to produce and combine musical fragments and a neural network (trained on examples of "real" music) to evaluate their fitness. A genetic algorithm is also a key part of the improvisation and accompaniment syste
GenJam
which has been developed since 1993 by Al Biles. Biles and GenJam are together known as the

Al Biles Virtual Quintet AL, Al, Ål or al may stand for: Arts and entertainment Fictional characters * Al (''Aladdin'') or Aladdin, the main character in Disney's ''Aladdin'' media * Al (''EastEnders''), a minor character in the British soap opera * Al (''Fullmetal ...

and have performed many times to human audiences. Genetic programming has been used to produce music since the work of Lee Spector and Alpern Alpern on evolved bebop musicians in 1994 and 1995, and in 1997 Brad Johanson and Riccardo Poli developed th
GP-Music System
which used genetic programming to breed melodies according to both human and automated ratings. Since 1996

Rodney Waschka II Rodney Waschka II is an American composer known for his algorithmic compositions and his theatrical works. Biography Waschka studied at Brooklyn College, at the Institute of Sonology, then newly part of the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and ...

has been using genetic algorithms for music composition including works such as ''Saint Ambrose'' and his string quartets. Several systems for drum loop evolution have been produced (including one commercial program calle
MuSing
.

Recent work

Th

(a

pun A pun, also known as paronomasia, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use of homophoni ...

on Eurovision Song Contest) was held a
EuroGP 2004
In this experiment several tens of users were first tested for their ability to recognise musical differences, and then a short piano-based melody was evolved. Al Biles gave
tutorial on evolutionary music
at GECCO 2005 and co-edited
book
on the subject with contributions from many researchers in the field.
Evolutune
is a small

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

application from 2005 for evolving simple loops of "beeps and boops". It has a graphical interface where the user can select parents manually.
MusicGenie
from 2006 uses genetic programming to evolve compositions in an

L-system An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a parallel rewriting system and a type of formal grammar. An L-system consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production rules that expand each symbol into som ...

language based on Holtzman's GCDL human composition language. The
GeneticDrummer
is a Genetic Algorithm-based system for generating human-competitive rhythm accompaniment. Th
easy Song Builder
is an evolutionary composition program. The user decides which version of the song will be the germ for the next generation. The

DarwinTunes DarwinTunes was a research project into the use of natural selection to create music led by Bob MacCallum and Armand Leroi, scientists at Imperial College London. The project asks volunteers on the Internet to listen to automatically generated sound ...

project has been running since 2009 (and before that as "Evolectronica") - recently a multiplayer game version of DarwinTunes was demonstrated at science festivals and is now available on the web.

Melomics Melomics (derived from "genomics of melodies") is a computational system for the automatic composition of music (with no human intervention), based on bioinspired algorithms. Technological aspects Melomics applies an evolutionary approach t ...

, an artificial intelligence group based in Málaga, Spain, has used evolutionary algorithms to compose full pieces of music in specific genres, creating the first album composed by a computer and performed by human musicians in 2012. The music is then exported into

mp3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and ...

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

, and PDF for application by the user.

Books

* ''Evolutionary Computer Music.'' Miranda, Eduardo Reck; Biles, John Al (Eds.) London: Springer, 2007. * ''The Art of Artificial Evolution: A Handbook on Evolutionary Art and Music'', Juan Romero and Penousal Machado (eds.), 2007, Springer * ''Creative Evolutionary Systems'' by David W. Corne, Peter J. Bentley * Fernández, Jose D., and Francisco Vico. "AI methods in algorithmic composition: A comprehensive survey." Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 48 (2013): 513–582.

Conferences

The EvoMUSART Conference from 2012 (previously a workshop from 2003) was part of the Evo* event annually from 2003. This event on evolutionary music and art is one of the main outlets for work on evolutionary music. An annual Workshop in Evolutionary Music has been held at GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference{{cite web, title=GECCO 2012, url=http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2012/) since 2011.

References

External links

Al Biles' Evolutionary Music Bibliography
– also includes pointers to work on evolutionary sound synthesis.
Evolectronica
interactive evolving streaming electronic music
Melomics
official site Electronic music Evolutionary algorithms