Kids Prefer Cheese: Intelligent Design: Music Edition

Friday, June 22, 2012

Can people design music through an evolutionary process? Maybe they can.

Slices, Individually Wrapped

At 3:50 PM, June 22, 2012 , John said...: What's really weird is that I was just listening to Meddle, and the somewhat random sounding piano melody at the beginning of Echoes reminded me of my computer music class and using Markov chains to generate derivative music works. All of that got me on a Wikipedia distraction chain. I skimmed the article but didn't see any mention of Markov chains in particular, but they're obviously pretty relevant.
At 4:04 PM, June 22, 2012 , John said...: Having read it closer, it's a very interesting idea. I think one crucial test of the viability of his theory is whether it can progress music beyond its current character (or multitude of characters). It could be that the system is very good at producing things that appeal to us as familiar music. Can it be so "visionary" that it gives people what they don't even know they want yet?

...Although, that may mis-characterize the way music has changed throughout history. Were Haydn, Bach, Beethoven and Mozart really groundbreaking? Or were the changes much more marginal?