Fitness in Evolutionary Art and Music: What Has Been Used and What Could Be Used?

This paper considers the notion of fitness in evolutionary art and music. A taxonomy is presented of the ways in which fitness is used in such systems, with two dimensions: what the fitness function is applied to, and the basis by which the function is constructed. Papers from a large collection are classified using this taxonomy. The paper then discusses a number of ideas that have not be used for fitness evaluation in evolutionary art and which might be valuable in future developments: memory, scaffolding, connotation and web search

Evolving music generation with SOM-fitness genetic programming

Most real life applications have huge search spaces. Evolutionary Computation provides an advantage in the form of parallel explorations of many parts of the search space. In this report, Genetic Programming is the technique we used to search for good melodic fragments. It is generally accepted that knowledge is a crucial factor to guide search. Here, we show that SOM can be used to facilitate the encoding of domain knowledge into the system. The SOM was trained with music of desired quality and was used as fitness functions. In this work, we are not interested in music with complex rules but with simple music employed in computer games. We argue that this technique provides a flexible and adaptive means to capture the domain knowledge in the system