Music evolves as composers, performers, and consumers favor some musical variants over others. To investigate the role of consumer selection, we constructed a Darwinian music engine consisting of a population of short audio loops that sexually reproduce and mutate. This population evolved for 2,513 generations under the selective influence of 6,931 consumers who rated the … Read more
Much of our enjoyment of music comes from its balance of predictability and surprise. Musical pitch fluctuations follow a 1/f power law that precisely achieves this balance. Musical rhythms, especially those of Western classical music, are considered highly regular and predictable, and this predictability has been hypothesized to underlie rhythm’s contribution to our enjoyment of … Read more
Spot-on, I think, Comment from the video — “It’s funny that it starts out mentioning that the engineer knew and made (or at least serviced) all the equipment, and the sound quality was great. But then, technology moved in, and the engineer became disconnected, and there hasn’t been “that sound” or any true hit ever … Read more