What's obviously missing is a "fitness function" that can approximate the equivalent of human taste, so the final evolved forms just end up being widely random in terms of quality.
AlgoMotion also did a video explanation for a music based version of Conway's Game of Life last year. Highly recommend their videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2SjVwYNr54
Incidentally if you like musical toys like this - Electroplankton [1] was a fun little game that had a series of almost organic musical instruments.
Honestly for me this is a feature not a bug. If I want to hear music that matches my personal taste exactly I can just go to my instrument and play it. These tools are a way to taste more exotic forms and see if there's anything worth carrying over.
But when we conceptualize something like music in the form of evolutionary computation then it is important to be able to define a good metric for the fitness function otherwise you might as well just take X pieces of music, normalize them to the same key signature/tempo/etc., and then randomly mash them together.
If you're just in the mood for something more exotic, I'm happy to go repeatedly sit on my piano for a few hours and send you the final samples.
https://tones.wolfram.com/ (not sure if it's still up, doesn't load for me)
Needs flash or iOS. Simple mechanics but lots of fun music. Good design.
“each cell birth plays a harmonic note and each death plays a complementary tone”
How are you deciding which notes to play?
Is it a function that somehow depends on generations or position?
ge96•3h ago
SanjayMehta•2h ago
ge96•1h ago
Side note, it's the Black Mirror episode Thronglets