While an artistic mind was always thought as a prerequisite when it comes to the creation of appealing music, the recent studies and research presents a different view. Scientists have created pleasing tunes from short sound sequences that were really harsh by following a simple voting process. Each sequence gets either a thumbs up or thumbs down and based on the same a decision was taken.

Computational biologist Bob MacCallum and colleagues were inspired by the experiments that questioned the evolution of bacteria. On the same basis, they decided to check if one could generate pleasant music from a collection of harsh sounds based on the selection of human listeners. They selected a loop of audio waveforms and evolved it randomly to create a number of options from which a selection was possible. More than 6,000 people heard these audio loops and graded each of them on a five-point scale based on the extent to which they liked the sounds. Those were liked, were combined with others to create more options while others were dropped. These new mutations created the next generation of audio clips.

Amazingly, the pieces developed into pleasant rhythm by the time 500th generation came up. They appeared like proper songs with chord structures. MacCallum and his colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported the same on 18 June 2012.

Currently, experiments are being carried out by researchers with more realistic and stricter sources of variation. The project termed as Darwin Tunes, is set to roll on with millions of users.

MacCallum, who is investigating at Imperial College London about the mosquito genomics, is of the view that if done properly, the quality of music generated would be at par with that of modern days man-made electronic and dance music. However, the same would be much more democratic.