Science:
Robert MacCallum of Imperial College London and his colleagues
can turn cacophony into music in a process akin to evolution.
The computer-based procedure starts with eight-second sequences
of randomly generated sounds. Random mutations, determined by
computer, occur in those sounds and either improve or worsen
the sound's musicality. As with sexual reproduction, pairs of
sequences ("DNA") then exchange the mutated sounds ("genes") to
create new sequences. To assess whether a sequence was
fitterâmdash;that is, more musically
pleasantâmdash;than its parents, MacCallum
enlisted human volunteers. Within about 2500 generations,
strains of inoffensive, jingly music had evolved.
A
paper describing the project appears today in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
