Edited* by Richard E. Lenski, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, and approved May 10, 2012 (received for review February 27, 2012)
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 loops’ aesthetic qualities. We found that the loops quickly evolved into music attributable, in part, to the evolution of aesthetically pleasing chords and rhythms. Later, however, evolution slowed. Applying the Price equation, a general description of evolutionary processes, we found that this stasis was mostly attributable to a decrease in the fidelity of transmission. Our experiment shows how cultural dynamics can be explained in terms of competing evolutionary forces.
↵2Present address: Centre for Digital Music, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary, University of London, London E1 4NS, United Kingdom.
Author contributions: R.M.M. and A.M.L. designed research; R.M.M. and M.M. performed research; R.M.M. and M.M. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; R.M.M., M.M., A.B., and A.M.L. analyzed data; and A.M.L. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
↵*This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor.
Data deposition: The data reported in this paper have been deposited in the Dryad Repository, http://datadryad.org (DOI no. 10.5061/dryad.h0228).
See Commentary on page 11898.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1203182109/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
