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DarwinTunes: Music Composed by Evolution Scientists at the Imperial College London have found a new way to compose music: via accelerated evolution. DarwinTunes begins with short clips of computer generated sounds that are sent through the processes of natural selection: listeners rate the clips, the highest rated clips survive to the next round and are "mated" to produce "offspring" while the lowest rated clips go extinct. Pieces of the top clips are paired and recombined, similar to how DNA is inheritted from parents in the biological world. Simple melodies started to appear by 1000 generations and, by 3000 generations, complex intertwining melodies and a rhythmic accompaniment had been produced. "We have shown that a simple Darwinian process can produce music", according to team lead Robert MacCallum...

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