Effect of blending inheritance in experimental evolution of music styles using automatic composition

Abstract

We report results of an experimental evolution to study the mechanism of music style evolution. Creative cultures including music are developed by descent-with-modification processes of knowledge about creating complex artifacts, but how new creation styles emerge and the influence of listeners/consumers through a social evaluation process are not well understood. To study these problems, we conducted an experiment where a population of automatic composition models, which simulate a population of human creators, evolves while being evaluated by many listeners. As a result, we found that adaptive evolutions of music styles can occur when blending inheritance of high-dimensional statistics representing composition styles is incorporated in the generation update process. A significant difference in musical preference depending on musical experience was also found. The results suggest a possibility of constructing a system of automatic composition in a new and preferred music style by the experimental framework.