Darwin Tunes

That's Generation Zero of DarwinTunes. It's a Web site [researchers:scientists] are using to study how [listener:predictors] preferences affect the evolution of music.A new study claims that the taste of the public exerts a force on music similar to natural selection. The findings support the theory that culture and art are shaped not only by their producers, but by consumers too. The report is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Researchers created short tunes and allowed them to procreate - that is, they'd combine aspects of the parent tunes to produce a new [generation:series] of music. User ratings on the [DarwinTunes:tunics] site provided the evolutionary selection, with only the most appealing tunes allowed to create progeny.The researchers found that quality [increased:raised] quickly at the beginning: the random sounds rapidly gave rise to [something:falling] an awful lot like music. Here's generation 600. But after a while things stagnated.