Over the past few years, Bob MacCallum has been focused on one question: can music evolve through natural selection? In this episode of Composer Quest, we discuss Bob's amazing evolutionary music project, DarwinTunes. In the DarwinTunes experiment/game, participants rate and "mate" short sound loops to breed new musical offspring. Although it started with randomly generated sine waves and noise, the evolved sounds are now surprisingly musical. Also in this episode, we talk about Bob's scientific analysis of over 70,000 Billboard hit songs from the past half-decade, which has revealed three major revolution years in music history: 1964, 1983, and 1991.
Tag: Science
Shepard Tone Illusion and the Super Mario 64 Endless Staircase
I think of the Shepard tone illusion as the musical equivalent of the infinite staircase. Play this video, and then replay it. Do you hear the tone continue to creep up?
The Tritone Paradox: How Your Hometown Affects Your Music Listening
Does where you grew up have an impact on how you hear music? It appears so, according to experiments by Dr. Diana Deutsch on how people hear her Tritone Paradox.
Experiments in the Revival of Organisms: A Trailer
A short film of mine premiered last night at St. Paul's Northern Spark festival, with the short film group I contribute to called MNKino. The theme was "arrivals and departures," and I had no idea what I was going to make until midnight the night before it was due. I was browsing archive.org and found a disturbing, but fascinating 1940 film documenting experiments on reviving dogs from the dead.
Season One Finale: Dmitri Tymoczko on Music Composition
Composer and Princeton professor Dmitri Tymoczko shares some excellent composing advice in this season finale episode of Composer Quest. Dmitri says that working on music theory as a composer is like lifting weights as a football player - it helps improve your intuitive composing. We also ponder the morality of exposing babies to only atonal music for experimental reasons.
Choosing Music Through Brainwave Headphones
I've always been amazed by technology that can turn our brainwaves into something tangible. I remember learning about a special brainwave-sensing headband that lets you control a computer mouse by thinking thoughts like "taco" or "hamburger" for the different mouse movements. There are also some brainwave dueling games, like Mindflex, where you have to out-concentrate your oppenent. I just found out about these special headphones that choose music for you based on your brainwaves.
Musical Illusions with Dr. Diana Deutsch
I was thrilled to talk with Dr. Diana Deutsch, a pioneer in the field of music perception and psychology (she literally wrote the book on music psychology). Diana has discovered a number of famous musical illusions. Prepare to have your mind blown by the octave illusion, the scale illusion, the tritone paradox, the mysterious melody, and the speech-to-song illusion "Sometimes Behave So Strangely," made popular by Radiolab. Diana also explains how composers can benefit from studying these perceptual illusions.
My Trip to the World’s Quietest Room
My girlfriend Maia, also an audio nerd, gave me one of the best birthday presents ever - a tour of the "World's Quietest Room"! The Guinness Book of World Records bestowed this title on the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As we found out in our tour, no one makes a microphone sensitive enough to accurately measure the decibel level of the room, since there's virtually no sound at all.
Eerie 3D Sound Illusion
Take a listen to this recording of shaking matches and you will certainly be creeped out by the three-dimensional audio effect created by using a binaural dummy head microphone.
An Amazing Water and Sine Wave Trick
This is so cool. Someone hooked up a sine wave generator to a hose of water and filmed the results. The water appears to create magical physics-defying coils.