DarwinTunes is a magical experiment in computer music that illuminates evolution in music, culture, and even ourselves. A simple sine wave is genetically combined in a myriad of patterns and broadcast over the Internet. The music is looped for 15 seconds and then a new variant played. Listeners just like you and me rate whether we like it. Our ratings determine which loops live and which die.
After just two months over 20,000 ratings have evolved 275 generations into wonderfully sweet music (to this US-cultured listener) that is surprisingly sophisticated with tempo changes, intertwining melodies, counterpoint, bass and treble lines, and color. The mutating music occasionally plays lemons but more often surprises and even delights with daring combinations and creative leaps You can even download the tunes. I like to use it as uptempo background music.
The premise that music, like all complicated forms of life and beauty, can be evolved is proven. Where does it end? And what does the experiment say about us?
Is man a simple beast? Will the music evolution flatten out, reaching a plateau that’s maximally suited to the human animal, a scientifically-definable level that corresponds to the capacity of our neural and aural wiring and sensors?
We already know that music has special properties to bypass the conscious mind and directly moderate and even manipulate moods and unconscious thought. I can hear that in DarwinTunes. Already it occasionally hits a loop that is “on” and engages both body and mind beyond the straightforward tones. It’s not much of a leap to imagine music like this (though far calmer) doled out in Orwell’s 1984 as aural pablum to control the masses.
Almost 30 years ago (yikes!) I wrote a story about music that had evolved so perfectly in tune with the human organism that it directly tapped into the pleasure centers. The result – catatonic fugue, a case of technology surpassing man.
But there is another future. Perhaps DarwinTunes will continue to climb the evolutionary path … and take us for the ride. Higher-order composition and complexity, unknown today, could break music boundaries, surpass the random stylings of human composers, and open our minds.
Human evolution has essentially stalled. Civilization has removed the process of natural selection, save the occasional buffoon cleaning his gun, drunk walking in front of a bus, or neanderthal starting a war. Evolution has jumped to another plane with cybernetic and networked life.
Yet we know that our brains from babies in the womb to seniors are plastic and constantly growing. Music has the potential not just to tap into our meat to make us happy, calm, angry, or zombies, but to program the wiring itself, building a higher order platform or operating system on our primitive wetware. Instead of a being limited beast, we would have unlimited godlike potential.
Or maybe the music itself, having achieved its own evolved sentience, influenced me to write this essay to ensure its parasitic existence. I’m sure it will have more precise instructions in the next generation.
In any event there is artifice aplenty in how the experiment is set up. I hope the researchers extend it by making all aspects of the music experience evolvable.
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Are we living in a simulation?
Published October 14, 2012 Commentary , Science 1 CommentWhat if you subscribed to the Do Not Simulate list? Surely there is some way to opt out of this spammy digital existence short of death.
The world is becoming increasingly digitized. 3D printers are already here. You won’t have to sorry about losing your car keys for the 20th time or building that collection of orphan socks. Just print another. Politicians are worried about people printing guns. But that’s small potatoes. Soon we’ll be able to print money, dogs, babies, and lovers. And clones, especially clones. Think of how productive you could be with your duplicates. It’s just a matter of time.
What happens when we expand beyond the limited computing capacity in our brain or outlive our bodies, even despite our cloaned body parts? When we just get tired of having to take a shower every day and say hello to the annoying neighbor next door? Futurists say that in our digital world we’ll download into a virtual life. I’ve already got my name on a hot little petrabyte drive when I go. But it’s clear now that I’ll just be zapped into the “cloud.”
Of course we’ll just repeat the same mistakes we did when we were meat in our funky simulated real life. In our virtual lives you know what we’ll all be doing. The same things we do on Second Life and the Net. We’ll be having sex with hot busty MILFs that wouldn’t have looked at us on the outside, drowning in trivial gossip, and watching LOLcat videos. Our fantasies will come true where our husbands actually listen and the kids are well behaved.
So we’ll be in a simulation in a simulation in a simulation. And that doesn’t count the sick fucks, aka Gods, who will want to create their own universes and play with their own galaxies, planets, and dues-paying citizenry that cling to such quaint ideas as free will. And eventually create their own simulations just like we’re doing.
There must be some limit to the potentially infinite recursion of simulations. I read a science fiction story where time slows as finite simulation processing resources approach full use. Just like using a Windows computer that gets clogged up every few days and is going to crash. So be sure to create your own universes before your neighbors do the same.
This isn’t just theoretical fun. We’re deconstructing the simulation through science and learning its rules now.
We see this digitization at the incredibly small nano scale where we’re reaching the limits of the known universe. Reality there is different. Albert Einstein got it wrong. God does play with dice. Quantum mechanics is just like magic. Quantum computing allows data to be transmitted immediately anywhere. Right now the distance may be microscopic. But again, it’s just a matter of time until it’s thousands of miles to anywhere else in the world, light years, or all the way to the other side of our simulated galaxy. Combine that with 3D printing and consciousness uploading and you have teleportation.
The scientists are finally getting with the program, so to speak. Check out The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation.
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