Evolutionary Musicology

We have a phenomenal memory for music and seem highly motivated to remember pleasurable music. Since emotions greatly enhance memory, perhaps music evoked emotions are responsible for our substantial music memory. This makes music an evolutionary difficulty because of that consumed memory plus music's strong pleasures drive resource consuming behaviors that appear not useful to survival. Why should music evoked emotions, which enhance memory, exist and be so pleasurable? We introduce a new evolutionary framework for music where an important mechanism has been overlooked: Trait elaboration for sensory exploitation of a sensory preference. The theory shows that music selection developed cognitive neural capacities that are directly reusable for providing language. Music is not a fitness indicator, but it is attractive which makes evolution run.

Music is a universal aspect of human culture across all societies and historical periods. While traditional views, such as those of Steven Pinker, consider music a non-essential by-product of culture (Pinker, 1997), ongoing research by scholars like Ian Cross, Steven Mithen, and Tecumseh Fitch explore whether music is an evolutionary adaptation, suggesting deeper biological and ecological significance. This dissertation explores music as a potential evolutionary adaptation by comparing human and non-human musical behaviours, including vocal learning, rhythmic synchronization, and communication.

Drawing on key sources such as (Jarvis, et al., 2000) on vocal learning, (Fitch, 2006b) on rhythmic, (Miller, 2000) on sexual selection, and (Brown, 2000b) & (Mithen, et al., 2006) on song-like protolanguage systems, study includes case analyses of humpback whale songs, birdsong, and primate vocalisations. The discussions suggest that musical traits such as vocal mimicry, beat synchronization, and complex vocal communication are not limited to humans but are present in several non-human animals, indicating shared evolutionary mechanisms. These shared traits may have evolved to serve adaptive functions such as social bonding, mate attraction, and coordinated group behaviour across species. Furthermore, the research supports the idea of a protolanguage—a shared ancestral system combining musical and linguistic elements—that may have served as a precursor to both music and language in early hominins, highlighting the intertwined evolutionary pathways of musicality and language development, therefore the necessity in human evolution.

Given the significant evolutionary gap between humans and non-human animals, which nevertheless display similar musical behaviours, the concept of convergent evolution provides a compelling framework for understanding how musical traits may have emerged independently across different species. The presence of complex vocal learning in species like songbirds or rhythmic synchronization in humpback whales suggests that these traits evolved to meet analogous adaptive needs, such as enhancing social cohesion, facilitating mate attraction, and coordinating group behaviours. This convergence implies that musicality may have provided specific evolutionary benefits that extend beyond the confines of human culture, challenging the notion of musicality as unique to humans. Additionally, evidence from archaeological findings, such as early musical instruments used by Early Humans, indicates that music-making has long been intertwined with both social and environmental contexts, further supporting the argument that the roots of musicality are deeply embedded in our evolutionary history.

By integrating perspectives from fields such as evolutionary biology, musicology, and environmental studies, this dissertation aims to propose a comprehensive framework for understanding the adaptive significance of musicality by examining the evolutionary connections between human and non-human animal musicality. Additionally, it seeks to address how these insights can possibly inform our understanding of urbanization’s impact on human and non-human sonic interactions, offering new directions for future research on eco-aware music.

Music is a universal aspect of human culture across all societies and historical periods. While traditional views, such as those of Steven Pinker, consider music a non-essential by-product of culture (Pinker, 1997), ongoing research by scholars like Ian Cross, Steven Mithen, and Tecumseh Fitch explore whether music is an evolutionary adaptation, suggesting deeper biological and ecological significance. This dissertation explores music as a potential evolutionary adaptation by comparing human and non-human musical behaviours, including vocal learning, rhythmic synchronization, and communication.

Drawing on key sources such as (Jarvis, et al., 2000) on vocal learning, (Fitch, 2006b) on rhythmic, (Miller, 2000) on sexual selection, and (Brown, 2000b) & (Mithen, et al., 2006) on song-like protolanguage systems, the study includes case analyses of humpback whale songs, birdsong, and primate vocalisations. The discussions suggest that musical traits such as vocal mimicry, beat synchronization, and complex vocal communication are not limited to humans but are present in several non-human animals, indicating shared evolutionary mechanisms. These shared traits may have evolved to serve adaptive functions such as social bonding, mate attraction, and coordinated group behaviour across species. Furthermore, the research supports the idea of a protolanguage—a shared ancestral system combining musical and linguistic elements—that may have served as a precursor to both music and language in early hominins, highlighting the intertwined evolutionary pathways of musicality and language development, therefore the necessity in human evolution.

Given the significant evolutionary gap between humans and non-human animals, which nevertheless display similar musical behaviours, the concept of convergent evolution provides a compelling framework for understanding how musical traits may have emerged independently across different species. The presence of complex vocal learning in species like songbirds or rhythmic synchronization in humpback whales suggests that these traits evolved to meet analogous adaptive needs, such as enhancing social cohesion, facilitating mate attraction, and coordinating group behaviors. This convergence implies that musicality may have provided specific evolutionary benefits that extend beyond the confines of human culture, challenging the notion of musicality as unique to humans. Additionally, evidence from archaeological findings, such as early musical instruments used by Early Humans, indicates that music-making has long been intertwined with both social and environmental contexts, further supporting the argument that the roots of musicality are deeply embedded in our evolutionary history.

By integrating perspectives from fields such as evolutionary biology, musicology, and environmental studies, this dissertation aims to propose a comprehensive framework for understanding the adaptive significance of musicality by examining the evolutionary connections between human and non-human animal musicality. Additionally, it seeks to address how these insights can possibly inform our understanding of urbanization’s impact on human and non-human sonic interactions, offering new directions for future research on eco-aware music.

We suggest the accounts offered by the target articles could be strengthened by acknowledging the role of group selection and cultural niche construction in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of human music. We argue that group level traits and highly variable cultural niches can explain the diversity of human song, but the target articles’ accounts are insufficient to explain such diversity.

were more predictive of voluntary attention than date outcome. Our results therefore suggest that especially voluntary attention can provide information about individual preferences and possibly also mate choice of people who are motivated to find a partner.

A number of theories about the origins of musicality have incorporated biological and social perspectives. Darwin argued that musicality evolved by sexual selection, functioning as a courtship display in reproductive partner choice. Darwin did not regard musicality as a sexually dimorphic trait, paralleling evidence that both sexes produce and enjoy music. A novel research strand examines the effect of musicality on sexual attraction by acknowledging the importance of facial attractiveness. We previously demonstrated that music varying in emotional content increases the perceived attractiveness and dating desirability of opposite-sex faces only in females, compared to a silent control condition. Here, we built upon this approach by presenting the person depicted (target) as the performer of the music (prime), thus establishing a direct link. We hypothesized that musical priming would increase sexual attraction, with high-arousing music inducing the largest effect. Musical primes (25 s, piano solo music) varied in arousal and pleasantness, and targets were photos of other-sex faces of average attractiveness and with neutral expressions (2 s). Participants were 35 females and 23 males (heterosexual psychology students, single, and no hormonal contraception use) matched for musical background, mood, and liking for the music used in the experiment. After musical priming, females' ratings of attractiveness and dating desirability increased significantly. In males, only dating desirability was significantly increased by musical priming. No specific effects of music-induced pleasantness and arousal were observed. Our results, together with other recent empirical evidence, corroborate the sexual selection hypothesis for the evolution of human musicality.

Animals can produce vocal rhythms in an interactive, coordinated manner (Couzin 2018). Comparing structural, spectral and temporal features across species (Fitch 2000) may help in reconstructing the evolutionary history of human speech (Ravignani and Norton 2017). Singing primates (Geissmann, 2000), which produce elaborated and complex sequences of vocalizations, are of particular interest for this topic. Similarly to humans, indris (Indri indri) assemble simple units into more complex structures to convey different information. Individuals react differently to different songs, confirming the presence of functionally referential communication systems (Clark et al. 2006). Indris are the only singing lemurs and emit songs whose most distinctive portions are "descending phrases", made of 2-5 units. Mated indris have been reported to sing in pairs, to enhance pair-bonding and defend their territories (Pollock, 1986; Torti et al., 2013; Bonadonna et al., 2017). Songs may have the form of a chorus whenever the subadult members of the groups also utter their contribution in a precise and coordinated manner (Torti et al., 2018). Indri songs exhibit turntaking between individuals of different sexes and a variable degree of overlap between group members (Gamba et al., 2016). Songs have various functions depending on the context in which are emitted (Torti et al., 2013), and they are used for both inter and intra-group communication. We recorded spontaneous vocalizations of 8 groups of indris at the Maromizaha New Protected Area (18°56′S, 48°27′E), from 2008 to 2018. Focal animal sampling (Altmann, 1974) allowed the attribution of each vocal profile to a signaler. To investigate the timing and rhythm of songs, we measured the amount of co-singing between different individual contributions (percentage of overlap;

Automatic music composition and sound synthesis is a field of study that gains continuously increasing attention. The introduction of Evolutionary Computation has further boosted the research towards exploring ways to incorporate human supervision and guidance in the automatic evolution of melodies and sounds. This kind of human-machine interaction belongs to a larger methodological context called Interactive Evolution (IE). For the automatic creation of art and especially for music synthesis, user fatigue requires that the evolutionary process produces interesting content that evolves fast. This paper addresses this issue by presenting an IE system that evolves melodies using Genetic Programming (GP). A modification of the GP operators is proposed that allows the user to have control on the randomness of the evolutionary process. The results obtained by subjective tests indicate that the utilization of the proposed genetic operators drives the evolution to more user-preferable sounds.

Articulate language is a form of communication unique to humans. Over time, a spectrum of researchers has proposed various frameworks attempting to explain the evolutionary acquisition of this distinctive human attribute, some deploring the apparent lack of direct evidence elucidating the phenomenon, whilst others have pointed to the contributions of palaeoanthropology, the social brain hypothesis and the fact that even amongst contemporary humans, social group sizes reflect brain size. Theologians have traditionally (largely) ignored evolutionary insights as an explanatory paradigm for the origin of humankind. However, an increasing number are, of late, contributing to a worldview of humanity which accommodates both the epistemological realities of evolutionary biology as well as insights from theology. This includes reviewing and assessing the origins of articulate language and the physiological attributes necessary for its development. It is in this sense that the evolution of la...

The efficient specification of aesthetic measures for music as a part of modelling human conception of sound is a challenging task and has motivated several research works. It is not only targeted to the creation of automatic music composers and raters, but also reinforces the research for a deeper understanding of human noesis. The aim of this work is twofold: first, it proposes an Interactive Evolution system that uses Genetic Programming to evolve simple 8-bit melodies. The results obtained by subjective tests indicate that evolution is driven towards more user-preferable sounds. In turn, by monitoring features of the melodies in different evolution stages, indications are provided that some sound features may subsume information about aesthetic criteria. The results are promising and signify that further study of aesthetic preference through Interactive Evolution may accelerate the progress towards defining aesthetic measures for sound and music.

the origin of human speech is still a hotly debated topic in science. evidence of socially-guided acoustic flexibility and proto-conversational rules has been found in several monkey species, but is lacking in social and cooperative great apes. Here we investigated spontaneous vocal interactions within a peaceful context in captive bonobos to reveal that vocal interactions obey temporally and social rules. Dyadic vocal interactions were characterized by call overlap avoidance and short inter-call intervals. Bonobos preferentially responded to conspecifics with whom they maintained close bonds. We also found that vocal sharing rate (production rate of shared acoustic variants within each given dyad) was mostly explained by the age difference of callers, as other individual characteristics (sex, kinship) and social parameters (affinity in spatial proximity and in vocal interactions) were not. Our results show that great apes spontaneously display primitive conversation rules guided by social bonds. The demonstration that such coordinated vocal interactions are shared between monkeys, apes and humans fills a significant gap in our knowledge of vocal communication within the primate phylogeny and highlights the universal feature of social influence in vocal interactions. The evolutionary origins of language and speech remains a fundamental question in science. In particular, whether clues to the origins of speech are present in nonhuman primate communication remains a hotly debated topic 1-4. Despite the diversity of social cultures and languages in humans, universal features in conversations are found across all languages, such as the avoidance of overlapping and a minimum gap between turns 5-8. Orderly vocal exchanges (antiphony between two or more animals or duets within male-female pairs 9) have been found across the primate order: from lemurs 10 , to New World monkeys 11-15 , Old World monkeys 16 and lesser apes 17,18. Vocal turn-taking appears to be associated with social life and cooperation capacities 1,2,5,9,19-21. It is thought to maintain and reinforce social bonds between individuals (e.g. in non-human primates 10,22), enable the extraction of information in the absence of overlap (e.g. 23 but see 24) and reduce stress as in the case of social grooming 25. Vocal exchange is "a characteristic communication style in which a sender produces a vocalization to address a receiver, and the receiver emits a call in response within a brief interval" (cited from 26). Vocal exchange patterns are influenced by social factors in non-human primates. 'Interlocutors' are not randomly selected, and preference is given to elders 11,27-29 , social allies 12,14,22 or dominant individuals 30,31. The attention of the audience also influences vocal outputs leading to persistence (repetition of calls) and elaboration (changes in the acoustic structure of calls) in situations where no response has been received 32,33. Shared primitive forms of vocal turn-taking within non-human primate species might suggest an ancient evolutionary origin 1,34. Surprisingly, however, studies based on great apes are scarce and controversial. No evidence of spontaneous vocal coordinated exchanges has been found in wild chimpanzees 35 , who display complex social interactions and cooperative abilities 36. Indeed, Arcadi 35 found that chimpanzees do not "respond" to the majority of calls they heard (within 5 sec), and that instead, bonded males tend to chorus together, matching each-other's pant hoots 37,38. Nevertheless, a recent study in great apes found for the first time that captive gorillas display some rule-governed call exchanges 31. Relying on our current knowledge, vocal turn-taking is thus reported across phylogenetically distant species (monkeys and more generally in some social mammals such as African elephants 39 , bottlenose dolphins 40 , bats 41,42 , naked mole-rats 43) but with some apparent discontinuities among great apes. More investigations among great ape species, our closest, highly social, relatives, are thus necessary in order to ascertain if vocal-turn taking behavior is as a result of convergent evolution (analogies as adaptations to similar social requirements) or is shared ancestry (homologies which are inheritance behaviours) 34 .

the origin of human speech is still a hotly debated topic in science. evidence of socially-guided acoustic flexibility and proto-conversational rules has been found in several monkey species, but is lacking in social and cooperative great apes. Here we investigated spontaneous vocal interactions within a peaceful context in captive bonobos to reveal that vocal interactions obey temporally and social rules. Dyadic vocal interactions were characterized by call overlap avoidance and short inter-call intervals. Bonobos preferentially responded to conspecifics with whom they maintained close bonds. We also found that vocal sharing rate (production rate of shared acoustic variants within each given dyad) was mostly explained by the age difference of callers, as other individual characteristics (sex, kinship) and social parameters (affinity in spatial proximity and in vocal interactions) were not. Our results show that great apes spontaneously display primitive conversation rules guided by social bonds. The demonstration that such coordinated vocal interactions are shared between monkeys, apes and humans fills a significant gap in our knowledge of vocal communication within the primate phylogeny and highlights the universal feature of social influence in vocal interactions. The evolutionary origins of language and speech remains a fundamental question in science. In particular, whether clues to the origins of speech are present in nonhuman primate communication remains a hotly debated topic 1-4. Despite the diversity of social cultures and languages in humans, universal features in conversations are found across all languages, such as the avoidance of overlapping and a minimum gap between turns 5-8. Orderly vocal exchanges (antiphony between two or more animals or duets within male-female pairs 9) have been found across the primate order: from lemurs 10 , to New World monkeys 11-15 , Old World monkeys 16 and lesser apes 17,18. Vocal turn-taking appears to be associated with social life and cooperation capacities 1,2,5,9,19-21. It is thought to maintain and reinforce social bonds between individuals (e.g. in non-human primates 10,22), enable the extraction of information in the absence of overlap (e.g. 23 but see 24) and reduce stress as in the case of social grooming 25. Vocal exchange is "a characteristic communication style in which a sender produces a vocalization to address a receiver, and the receiver emits a call in response within a brief interval" (cited from 26). Vocal exchange patterns are influenced by social factors in non-human primates. 'Interlocutors' are not randomly selected, and preference is given to elders 11,27-29 , social allies 12,14,22 or dominant individuals 30,31. The attention of the audience also influences vocal outputs leading to persistence (repetition of calls) and elaboration (changes in the acoustic structure of calls) in situations where no response has been received 32,33. Shared primitive forms of vocal turn-taking within non-human primate species might suggest an ancient evolutionary origin 1,34. Surprisingly, however, studies based on great apes are scarce and controversial. No evidence of spontaneous vocal coordinated exchanges has been found in wild chimpanzees 35 , who display complex social interactions and cooperative abilities 36. Indeed, Arcadi 35 found that chimpanzees do not "respond" to the majority of calls they heard (within 5 sec), and that instead, bonded males tend to chorus together, matching each-other's pant hoots 37,38. Nevertheless, a recent study in great apes found for the first time that captive gorillas display some rule-governed call exchanges 31. Relying on our current knowledge, vocal turn-taking is thus reported across phylogenetically distant species (monkeys and more generally in some social mammals such as African elephants 39 , bottlenose dolphins 40 , bats 41,42 , naked mole-rats 43) but with some apparent discontinuities among great apes. More investigations among great ape species, our closest, highly social, relatives, are thus necessary in order to ascertain if vocal-turn taking behavior is as a result of convergent evolution (analogies as adaptations to similar social requirements) or is shared ancestry (homologies which are inheritance behaviours) 34 .

At first approach it is easy to write off Pinker’s claim that music is merely an “exquisite confection” which gives pleasure to “sensitive spots...of 6 of our mental faculties.” Is it merely a claim made by someone ignorant of the importance of music, or convinced of language’s superiority as a method of interaction? Or, is there some merit to it? The suggestions that sexual selection and social cohesion are driving forces behind the development of complex forms of communication or interaction in hominids would seem to support the development of language first as the most effective and efficient means to that end (music contributing more tangentially, being more open to differing interpretation), but,
the implications of this - that musical ability developed later, and was less important as a vehicle for neurological development - are not supported by the neurological localisation and structure of components of musical and linguistic ability; nor is it supported by ethnomusicological studies, as we will see.

Evolutionary musicology is a subdiscipline of biomusicology, the study of music from a biological perspective, which embeds the psychological and physiological mechanisms of human music perception and production in the theory of biological evolution. Evolutionary musicology studies the origin and evolution of music in the human species, encompassing vocal communication and musical behaviors in non-human animal species; behavioral, cognitive, and neurological development of musical processing and skill; cross-cultural human universals in musical capacity and cognitive processing; and archeological evidence to develop hypotheses concerning the evolution of human musical appreciation and music-making.

This paper proposes a formal definition of the concept of Probability Distribution Follower and a simple method, based on Monte Carlo Simulation Techniques, to implement it for discrete numbers. We define a Probability Distribution Follower as a real-time random numbers generator that is able to fit any changing in time non-standard Probability Distribution. This paper will show the utility and the possibilities of integrating this kind of algorithms in technological artistic works. This algorithm provides a simple and easy form of real-time following a Changing Probability Distribution Curve. Finally, this paper explains how it was used in the work "Transcognition". In this work, I consider that a Cognitive Agent is collaborative when it follows the Probability Distribution of a database that stores all the notes created by the rest of the Cognitive Agents. The Probability Distribution of this database changes over time in an unpredictable way so this algorithm provides the way to follow the changes in real-time regardless of its mathematical definition.

Music and language are universal human abilities with many apparent similarities relating to their acoustics, structure, and frequent use in social situations. We might therefore expect them to be understood and processed similarly, and indeed an emerging body of research suggests that this is the case. But the focus has historically been on the individual, looking at the passive listener or the isolated speaker or performer, even though social interaction is the primary site of use for both domains. Nonetheless, an important goal of emerging research is to compare music and language in terms of acoustics and structure, social interaction, and functional origins to develop parallel accounts across the two domains. Indeed, a central aim of both of evolutionary musicology and language evolution research is to understand the adaptive significance or functional origin of human music and language. An influential proposal to emerge in recent years has been referred to as the social bonding hypothesis. Here, within a comparative approach to animal communication systems, I review empirical studies in support of the social bonding hypothesis in humans, non-human primates, songbirds, and various other mammals. In support of this hypothesis, I review six research fields: (i) the functional origins of music; (ii) the functional origins of language; (iii) mechanisms of social synchrony for human social bonding; (iv) language and social bonding in humans; (v) music and social bonding in humans; and (vi) pitch, tone and emotional expression in human speech and music. I conclude that the comparative study of complex vocalizations and behaviors in various extant species can provide important insights into the adaptive function(s) of these traits in these species, as well as offer evidence-based speculations for the existence of "musilanguage" in our primate ancestors, and thus inform our understanding of the biology and evolution of human music and language.

Between the Species, vol. 20, no. 1 (Summer 2017)
Bug Music is the third installment in David Rothenberg’s animal music trilogy. The first two books explored the more obviously musical songbirds and humpback whales (Why Birds Sing and Thousand Mile Song). His foray into the comparatively alien world of insects and bugs asks that we open our ears to the “more humble parts of [nature’s] grand resonance” (82).

The aim of this article is to observe the domain of Biomusicology, sub-branches, its methods, theories and approaches. Thus, this article also tries to understand two different sides of Biomusicology, which are biological and cultural components of music, in general the difference between Humanities/Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. Biomusicology, as an interdisciplinary field, is derived from many different disciplines such as Biology, Ethnomusicology, Musicology, Cognitive Science, and Psychology. By the different approaches, the field of Biomusicology investigates the origins of music, musical universals and neurological human music-making process in all biological and cultural dimensions. In this way, Biomusicology attempts to negotiate biological and cultural approaches of music and find a solution for cultural/biological dichotomy in music studies (Cross 2001: 514). By doing this, Biomusicology also tries to fill the gap between Humanities/Social Sciences and Natural Sciences as an interdisciplinary field, which coins new paradigm for a future research.

The article is focused on the development of Zoo-musicology in 1980-90-ties. It was one of the first scientific directions (along with bio-musicology), which became consider music in the frame of nature-cultural paradigm. There were allocated the processes, which played important role for the formation of zoo-musicology, bio-musicology, neuro-musicology and as a result of evolutionary musicology:

The efficient specification of aesthetic measures for music as a part of modelling human conception of sound is a challenging task and has motivated several research works. It is not only targeted to the creation of automatic music composers and raters, but also reinforces the research for a deeper understanding of human noesis. The aim of this work is twofold: first, it proposes an Interactive Evolution system that uses Genetic Programming to evolve simple 8-bit melodies. The results obtained by subjective tests indicate that evolution is driven towards more user-preferable sounds. In turn, by monitoring features of the melodies in different evolution stages, indications are provided that some sound features may subsume information about aesthetic criteria. The results are promising and signify that further study of aesthetic preference through Interactive Evolution may accelerate the progress towards defining aesthetic measures for sound and music.

Automatic music composition and sound synthesis is a field of study that gains continuously increasing attention. The introduction of evolutionary computation has further boosted the research towards exploring ways to incorporate human supervision and guidance in the automatic evolution of melodies and sounds. This kind of human-machine interaction belongs to a larger methodological context called interactive evolution (IE). For the automatic creation of art and especially for music synthesis, user fatigue requires that the evolutionary process produces interesting content that evolves fast. This paper addresses this issue by presenting an IE system that evolves melodies using genetic programming (GP). A modification of the GP operators is proposed that allows the user to have control on the randomness of the evolutionary process. The results obtained by subjective tests indicate that the utilization of the proposed genetic operators drives the evolution to more user-preferable sounds.

The efficient specification of aesthetic measures for music as a part of modelling human conception of sound is a challenging task and has motivated several research works. It is not only targeted to the creation of automatic music composers and raters, but also reinforces the research for a deeper understanding of human noesis. The aim of this work is twofold: first, it proposes an Interactive Evolution system that uses Genetic Programming to evolve simple 8-bit melodies. The results obtained by subjective tests indicate that evolution is driven towards more user-preferable sounds. In turn, by monitoring features of the melodies in different evolution stages, indications are provided that some sound features may subsume information about aesthetic criteria. The results are promising and signify that further study of aesthetic preference through Interactive Evolution may accelerate the progress towards defining aesthetic measures for sound and music.

Very short computer programs, sometimes consisting of as few as three arithmetic operations in an infinite loop, can generate data that sounds like music when output as raw PCM audio. The space of such programs was recently explored by dozens of individuals within various on-line communities. This paper discusses the programs resulting from this exploratory work and highlights some rather unusual methods they use for synthesizing sound and generating musical structure.

Automatic music composition and sound syn- thesis is a field of study that gains continuously increasing attention. The introduction of evolutionary computation has further boosted the research towards exploring ways to incorporate human supervision and guidance in the auto- matic evolution of melodies and sounds. This kind of human–machine interaction belongs to a larger methodo- logical context called interactive evolution (IE). For the automatic creation of art and especially for music synthe- sis, user fatigue requires that the evolutionary process produces interesting content that evolves fast. This paper addresses this issue by presenting an IE system that evolves melodies using genetic programming (GP). A modification of the GP operators is proposed that allows the user to have control on the randomness of the evolutionary process. The results obtained by subjective tests indicate that the utili- zation of the proposed genetic operators drives the evolu- tion to more user-preferable sounds.

The efficient specification of aesthetic measures for music as a part of modelling human conception of sound is a challenging task and has motivated several research works. It is not only targeted to the creation of automatic music composers and raters, but also reinforces the research for a deeper understanding of human noesis. The aim of this work is twofold: first, it proposes an Interactive Evolution system that uses Genetic Programming to evolve simple 8–bit melodies. The results obtained by subjective tests indicate that evolution is driven towards more user–preferable sounds. In turn, by monitoring features of the melodies in different evolution stages, indications are provided that some sound features may subsume information about aesthetic criteria. The results are promising and signify that further study of aesthetic preference through Interactive Evolution may accelerate the progress towards defining aesthetic measures for sound and music.

Automatic music composition and sound synthesis is a field of study that gains continuously increasing attention. The introduction of Evolutionary Computation has further boosted the research towards exploring ways to incorporate human supervision and guidance in the automatic evolution of melodies and sounds. This kind of human-machine interaction belongs to a larger methodological context called Interactive Evolution (IE). For the automatic creation of art and especially for music synthesis, user fatigue requires that the evolutionary process produces interesting content that evolves fast. This paper addresses this issue by presenting an IE system that evolves melodies using Genetic Programming (GP). A modification of the GP operators is proposed that allows the user to have control on the randomness of the evolutionary process. The results obtained by subjective tests indicate that the utilization of the proposed genetic operators drives the evolution to more user-preferable sounds.

The efficient specification of aesthetic measures for music as a part of modelling human conception of sound is a challenging task and has motivated several research works. It is not only targeted to the creation of automatic music composers and raters, but also reinforces the research for a deeper understanding of human noesis. The aim of this work is twofold: first, it proposes an Interactive Evolution system that uses Genetic Programming to evolve simple 8-bit melodies. The results obtained by subjective tests indicate that evolution is driven towards more user-preferable sounds. In turn, by monitoring features of the melodies in different evolution stages, indications are provided that some sound features may subsume information about aesthetic criteria. The results are promising and signify that further study of aesthetic preference through Interactive Evolution may accelerate the progress towards defining aesthetic measures for sound and music.