Share your DarwinTunes.org organisms!

Someone posted a link to DarwinTunes on WATMM recently, and since then I have been enjoying it immensely. At first I was just making random sonic creatures and seeing if anyone else liked them, but then I started really focusing on how the software works and how to identify unique pieces of "DNA" within hundreds of different loops. From there I intentionally bred loops that would sound good looped together as they evolved.

Here is my first attempt. I started a new user and mated two other user's creatures. From there I just kept going, trying to keep a theme, filter out unwanted elements, strengthen other desirable elements, and make sure the evolution didn't make overly drastic mutations. The only thing NOT pure DarwinTunes in the whole track is minimal anti-clipping, sub-40hz filtering, and dynamic range compression. Loop stitching was done in Audacity.

Lotsa fun - I'd like to see other people try this out!

DarwinTune #002

Server crashed while I was breeding an outro, but it came out good anyway. This time there was no EQ/DRC or re-use of any loops post-production. The low frequencies overpower my Labtec PC subwoofer, but it sounds nice and clean on my KRK setup.

DarwinTune #003

Almost gave up on this one, pretty disjunct until the second half where I found a groove somewhere in that mess. Very gritty but I like it.

Also, how the HELL did someone pull Sixteen Candles out of this software? The melody was definitely not in the original seed wavs.

DarwinTune #004

64 consecutive offspring played in generational order, 8 offspring were especially good and were played back twice instead of once. Made with all fresh loops bred by myself and others in the last 24 hours. Enjoy!

http://soundcloud.com/jsmcpn/darwintune-004

Interesting... The spontaneous bizarre sixteen candles loop that sprung out of nowhere via Cookie Mobster is actually a wild mutation of something I had heard on the first day using the site. A chime sound that played only once in the loop, somehow got wrapped in on itself and plays not just one note but the G-E-D-C sequence that it must have inherited from someone else, over and over and over.

Here is some good technical information about the original DarwinTunes. The current 'game' form is different in how it is consumed, but the underlying environment and evolution code is mostly the same.

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/30/12081.full.pdf

This one was as struggle... there haven't been many players lately so the gene pool is getting shallow, and people have been focusing on really nasty sounds.

This is the first one where zero loops were re-used.

This is pretty crazy. Seems like a lot of work to stitch together all the clips but what you've made is actually pretty interesting.

  On 2/17/2015 at 6:12 AM, sonnyskare said:

This is pretty crazy. Seems like a lot of work to stitch together all the clips but what you've made is actually pretty interesting.

Actually, stitching is the quick part! Breeding 50-80 consecutive loops while trying to keep a "theme" going is pretty tough! Sometimes you hit roadblocks where none of the potential parent loops are what you want, and/or none of the child loops are suitable either. You either end the track there, or try to keep going and breed the bad genes out. The silver lining is that many times, you think you have a disaster on your hands but it turns out to be a blessing in disguise a few loops later.

Trying to control the thing and use it as a music making tool is really fun - it is a synth with a mind of its own and only one button!

My setup is to have the game open in browser, a folder to hold all the 4-bar WAV files, and Foobar2000 open to an empty playlist. Each time a new loop is born, I download it and drag it to the Foo playlist to keep all the loops in order. DarwinTunes loops are seamless, so you just simply play them back in order using a player (Foobar) that doesn't create silent gaps between tracks. Foobar also has a nice feature that lets you convert one or more audio files to a single output file, so once all the loops are in a playlist you just select-all, right click and convert to a single WAV! Then it goes into Audacity for post, which is usually just fading out the ending, EQ to clean up muddy bass or sharp highs, and maybe compress/limit as the last step.

Overall, 2-3 hours seems to be the typical time it takes between starting a new tune and uploading it to SoundCloud.

l00l! A loop I just bred that sounds #LikeVenetianSnares

  On 2/17/2015 at 9:50 PM, jsmcpn said:

l00l! A loop I just bred that sounds #LikeVenetianSnares

 

http://game.darwintunes.org/REST/population/1/individual/7ee70074/audio.mp3

I liked that loop enough to start a new offspring with it

too much inbreeding!!!

  On 2/18/2015 at 3:50 AM, Bubba69 said:

too much inbreeding!!!

Sometimes you have to, repeatedly, in order to "distill" a single sound. This is as close as I have gotten this one to the original source sample, but it still has stubborn mutation and delay FX that are deeply ingrained in the loop:

And a few others that are quite "pure"

Versus a loop mutated very severely. The interesting part is the pattern of low clicks and rumbles, 3-4-5-6 with the last bit of 6 wrapped around to the front:

Another distillation:

And bringing out more of the original orchestal samples:

Successfully transferred only the echo FX from a completely different sound onto mine without inheriting any of the audio portion of the loop:

  On 2/19/2015 at 8:02 AM, jsmcpn said:

^^^^^^^^^

I took a nearly identical starting loop as #009 had, and hung a left at the fork this time.

Another distillation

This one came out quite nice IMHO! Only a single loop (40ffac8b) is used twice in a row, except for the end loop which repeats for a fadeout.

Two new thingamajigs

Great subwoofer action in this one...

Two loops re-used, the rest are all sequential. Strange FX turns the reverb-static into a lawnmower sound at the end.

Nobody playing DarwinTunes => shallow gene pool -> track 15 kinda 'meh'