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Music Evolution with DarwinTunes Creator Bob MacCallum

Over the past few years, Bob MacCallum has been focused on one question: can music evolve through natural selection? In this episode of Composer Quest, we discuss Bob's amazing evolutionary music project, DarwinTunes. In the DarwinTunes experiment/game, participants rate and "mate" short sound loops to breed new musical offspring. Although it started with randomly generated sine waves and noise, the evolved sounds are now surprisingly musical. Also in this episode, we talk about Bob's scientific analysis of over 70,000 Billboard hit songs from the past half-decade, which has revealed three major revolution years in music history: 1964, 1983, and 1991.

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Robot Drummers and Patrick Flanagan of Jazari

Patrick Flanagan Jazari Robot Band

Cyborg percussion ensemble Jazari was created by "token human" Patrick Flanagan. He made a kind of robot drum circle that beats on acoustic bongos, cowbells, a djembe, and more. In episode 32 of Composer Quest, Patrick talks with me about his robot band, his day job creating musical iPhone apps, and his reasons for leaving the academic composing world to create dance music.

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