Data from: Evolution of music by public choice

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. The
audio files attached below can also be heard at .