Project Description

ñandú was a research experiment in computational and social creativity, made by Bazyli Brzóska and Michał Buczek. It run for a year as a Facebook application. Based on the Darwinian theory of evolution, this project’s main idea is to create self-evolving music, which will sound slightly different every time it is played, while at the same time testing the quality of computational evolution seeded by data from Facebook users.

The software is based on user-interactive evolution, where the user can select the parts of the track which he likes and ones which he does not like. It imitates the behaviour of genetic evolution of species and biological natural selection – where the users are the natural environment for the track to evolve in. The parts tagged as “bad” become recessive and eventually mutate or completely die out, and the “good” parts survive to create offsprings: new versions of the track.

The Concept

Nowadays popular and conventional ways of playback of music are very limited in terms of adding variation to how it is played every time. Usually, we only have the option to playback the piece exactly the way it was recorded and mixed. We are only able to influence the environment in which we hear it. If we want a “real”, “live” experience, our almost sole option is to see a live performance.