Further Thoughts on Musical Evo-Devo
I keep thinking off and on about writing a program to apply evo-devo to musical composition (part 2 ). There are tons of problems to solve, of course, but I may have made some progress.
Software Enzymes for Musical Composition
When
I last wrote about using evo-devo to compose music,
I had gotten stuck on the problem of implementation. In particular, I couldn’t figure out how to write a seed organism that would develop into a simple composition that I could then use to evolve other tunes. I also wasn’t sure how to get the various genes to actually work together, not at a level at which I could start coding.
After some thought, it occurred to me that enzymes and proteins act sort of like functions in software: they bind to molecules (take arguments), which they can then modify, and sometimes release another molecule into the surrounding medium (return a value). So I just needed to come up with the software equivalent of an enzyme.