Music Socializing
Any group of people who speak the same language can hold an impromptu conversation. But a group of persons can improvise a shared musical composition only if they have musical training. Non-musicians customarily express themselves musically by selecting which music to play for other people, and by congregating in venues where music they prefer is played.

This projects aims to open new means of socializing for non-musicians, based on real and fine-grained musical exchange. This means of socializing would be more interactive than the typical situation where groups of listeners pay attention to a single musical source, as in a concert, club, or living room. In this work, personal musical taste, manifested in the users' music choices, gives rise to a fluid, ongoing improvisation within the larger context of a shared music environment.

Music is a primarily non-symbolic form of expression, unlike verbalization. Musical exchange is based on a shared aesthetic sense of what-goes-with-what rather than what-means-what. Fashion provides a similar example of personal expression and group identification. Persons who ascribe to similar fashion aesthetics tend to flock together in various social settings. In those settings each participant injects his or her own aesthetic choices into a stylistic mix constrained by a particular fashion sense. In fashion as well as music, what-goes-with-what is more important than what-means-what; participants express aesthetic, rather than verbal, agreement.

This project provides users the ability to actively shape an evolving, shared, musical aesthetic at a level of detail that previously was possible only in other domains, such as clothing.


Musical Ecosystem
In this project evolutionary behavior is manifested at three distinct levels. First there is the evolution of the building blocks themselves. This level of evolution is implicit in the mathematical description of the building blocks, as described below. Then there is the competitive evolution of musical strategies for combining and manipulating these building blocks. This evolution occurs within genetic algorithms implemented by the software. Finally there is evolution of musical results driven by the interactions of users in the shared musical environments. Cooperation occurs within each shared musical space, and competition occurs between those spaces, as participants choose among the available shared spaces.

The environment functions as a music ecosystem where musical memes interact and evolve.