Selection Songs: Evolutionary Music Computation

In this article, we provide a brief introduction to the use of evolutionary computation in the arts, focusing on two approaches that we have taken in our own work on the evolution of music-making systems. Evolutionary computation is an area of computer science in which methods inspired by genetics and evolutionary biology are harnessed to explore vast search spaces and to solve computational problems. Several people have used these methods for artistic purposes, driven in part by the obvious creative track record of biological evolution. We describe the genetic programming process, challenges in fitness assessment for evolving music, and our experiments with evolving music-producing virtual organisms.