lee Hirsch

populations together, across tribal lines and class differences. Through ingenious channels of communication it carried the messages of the movement to and from the most isolated communities: songs created at the notorious Robben Island prison would find their way to school kids in Soweto within

irtual Bre dmg of Sound

days, sometimes hours. Activists turned DJs popularized many of these songs through Radio Freedom, a pirate radio station based in Lusaka, Zambia. Its broadcasts found their way onto South African soil as activists would huddle at great risk listening to the news of the day and the latest liberation songs. At the dawn of liberation in the early 1990s South Africans by and large stood together in a proud, hopeful, and electrifying collective. Fast-forward to 2007: as South Africa's economy and democracy thrive, I am often asked what has become of the liberation songs? A better question would be; what's become of the collective? These days, many of my friends like Nhlahla actively lament the loss of the collective spirit, the near disappearance of freedom songs-by the mid-'90s the writing was already on the wall. While South Africa's racial barriers faded, her class divisions grew, and community and activist leaders disappeared fro m the townships scurrying for their places behind the walls and razor wires of previously all-white-tree-lined suburbs. Crime and HIV were left behind. The march of modernity was on and it was centered on the individual. Across the arts spectrum, expressions of struggle were redundant and losing appeal; youth wanted to forget the past. In its place rose a new inspirationa l voice-bring on the bling! While American and international beats have always been popular on South Africa's airwaves, hip-hop and electronic m usic has begun to dominate South African musicians struggling for their place in
Manuel DeLanda

rapidly decreasing "local" slots. Somewhere through this cacophony of sounds and styles competing for dollars and relevance, the political, cultural, and economic landscape co ntinues to transform. The collective voice can still be heard, albeit more softly: HIV activists, trade unionists, and those still living in squalor are reinven tin g the songs of the past for the struggles of today. They say that song is there, and can always be used when it's needed; I am not so sure. Ca n Americans bre;)k o ut into song as freely as we did during th e ivil and Viet nam war protests? Are th ere songs being created In IllOhil i'/ l' Ih e 1 3ush ;)dm inislra ', lion ? Or, is it possible that jusl a f('w )',('11('1.1 11111 1 III Illill',ging in and lunin g o ut co uld erad ic;)te thai apal il y<

Even a casual visit to a complex ecosystem can become an intense musica l 'x pcrience, as the natural sounds that arise from a m ultiplicity of anim al ., playing the role of identification, seduction, warning, weave themselves into a ri ' h tapestry. Most of these sounds are genetically hardwired and so hav ' evolved side by side with the genetic materials that form their substralun l. But a few of these, like the complex song of the blackbird, have acquir'd :I degree of independence from their genetic foundation . In such cases only lli l' hare structure of a song is inherited, an impoverished backbon e whi h I1lu \ 1 he supplemented by the actual listening of the adult song with all il s fl clI lri\ h ing details to become fully developed. What this means is thai Ih 'se SOil );', have become memes, patterns of behavior transmitted throu gh il/lil(//io ll , .I lld ,IS such, capable of having an evolution of their own. A simil ar poinl (:111 ill' made of some nonnatural sounds, like the phonemes that form th e raw 111.11 (' ri,ll of human languages. Unlike memes, these are patterns of behavior 11 ,111\ lIlilied through social obligation, to the extent that learnin g th e ide nl if'y ill \', of one's speech community is a necessary condition for be lon gill g 10 Ihal co mmunity. (So, rather than "memes," we may call th ese rcpli " 11 il l)', ,o unds " norms.") In either case, we have here examples of oni mal 'l' iul\ I kll, having acqui red a replicator status of th ei r own, have for Ihe sa m' l'e.\\OII \c p;lraled themselves from genetic matter and taken f1i ghl , followin g IIi ('It IIWIl ' voluli o nary lin e.

The Virtual Breeding of Sound Manuel DeLanda

The realization that evolutionary change may take place in any population of variable replica tors, and that not only selection pressures like climate, predators, or parasites can steer this process but so can anything that acts as a sorting device, is the key to the project of using computers to perform virtual evolution. Perhaps the most famous example here is the genetic algorithm created by John Holland, but there are several others (genetic programming, evolutionary strategies, evolutionary programming) .l Behind the details of each different implementation is the idea that coupling replicators to a sorting device results in an automatic search process (the genetic algorithm is classified as a search algorithm in computer science), that is, that as the population goes through many generations a space of possibilities is explored thoroughly (if blindly, given that evolution has no foresight). This search space may be a space of possible bird songs, or of possible linguistic phonemes, or in those cases where artists use genetic algorithms, a space of possible musical compositions. In a sense this simply automates a combinatorial process which, in principle, can be, and has been, carried on by hand by past musicians. As the authors of one genetic algorithm-based music system (Vox Populi) write:

Systems of algorithmic composition evolved side by side with the aris ing of Western music. One of the firs t known proposals to formalize composition was made by the Italian monk Guido d'Arezzo, in 1206, who resorted to using a number of simple rules that mapped liturgical texts in Gregorian chant, due to an overwhelming number of orders for his compositions. In the classical era, composers such as Mozart, Haydn, and C. P. E. Bach used an algorithmic decision process called "Wurfelspiel" (Dice Game) to compose minuets and other works. The music was constructed by means 2 of random selection of segments from a table of motifs.

The difference between those early attempts and current ones using virtual evolution is in the size and complexity of the search space. Whereas a table of motifs may have only a limited combinatorial productivity, computers allow the creation of much larger search spaces with potentially an infinite number of possible combinations. The first condition for tapping this new reservoir of algorithmic resources is to transform sonic raw materials into replicato rs. Since we cannot count on a community of imitators to make them into memes, or a social community to obey them as norms, the sounds must replicate themselves through genes. The simplest way of doing this, but by no means the only way or even th e most productive one, is to make a conven tiona l digita l encoding of the four compon ents of a sound : pitch, timbre, h :l Vl' had h convenliona l cod e avai lJblc loudness, and duration . Musi

for years in the form of the note tables for pitch, velocity tables for loudness, and tables for timbre offered by the MIDI standard. Using this code, the " DNA" of a particular sound can be easily created. In Vox Populi, for exam pie, each replicator is defined as a group of four notes, and its genetic inror mation as a sequence of strings of ones and zeros (one string for each component of each sound) .3 The crucial property of variability (the varia l i011 of the replicators is what fuels evolution) may be implemented either as jJo il/! lIlutations that stochastically change a one into a zero (or vice versa) or, i" sexual reproduction is simulated, as recombinations of parts of one digita l sc quence with another. It is not always this simple to decide how to inject vari Jbility into the population. In some cases, where the artist needs to redu e Ihe search space so that the evolved compositions stay within a given genre (say, jazz, as in the program GenJam), the design of the mutation and recomb il l:1 tion operators becomes more complex. The next step is to take a population of these son ic replicators and un l '.1, 11 them into a virtual environment. It is important to realize that one nced, .111 entire reproductive community of sounds, and not a sonic "Adam and .. " to get the process going, since the mutations that emerge do so at d il f'cr,'llI places in the collectivity and need time to propagate through it. This jl"l another way of saying that the efficiency of genetic algorithms a sea r ' h ]11() grams depends on the fact that they explore search space in pam llel, an l' nl il (. population moving through that space one generational tic at a li m '. III IiiI' case of Vox Populi, a population offour-note chords is set into ll1o lio ll , 1'.1111 gene ration yielding a single "winner" which is then added 10 prev ioll' lll\lld " to form a sequence that, when sent to the MIDI port, "produ cs .I 1(' suit resembling a chord cadence or a fast counterpoint of no le blnli,\." I Finally, we need to implement the "sorting device," th il t is, SOIll ' .1 1.d "I',I1 ( 1 of natural selection. Short of creating an enti re ecosys tem or S() ll lld, willi dtl ferent functions, some sounds preying on others, some play in g 10 parasites, and so on, the simplest solution here is to imit ate Ihe ]11 (l l'" (II prize-dog or race-horse breedin g, where the aesthetic sense Or:l hll lll,1I 1 Iwil ' !" becomes the filter that allows some replieators to survive inlo, 10 pea I' from, the next generation . In the case of virtual evolu l ion , Ihe iV(' action of the breeder may be done in person, the artist checkin g (,Ieh gl'lll' I.1 Iion for ilesthetic fitness ilnd directly eliminating those so unds nOI (,()midl'l (', I fil, or th e judgme nl or Ihe arlist may itself be encoded into y'l :1Il01I1l' l ]11(1 gram whi ch aU loll1;l li c:l ll y Ih e degree or acslhelic fi ln ess. In ( illi l'!' ( .hl

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The Virtual Breeding of Sound

Manuel DeLanda

may spend long periods of time experimenting with different runs of evolu tion using them as partial searches of a large musical space, the interface d ,sign may be relatively simple. But if, on the other hand, the virtual evolution is supposed to assist the artist in a real-time performance, interface questions become complex and crucial. A good example of real-time evolution is GenJam, a program for breeding Jazz solos. The program "hears" what a human plays and rapidly evolves a response. Given that there is not much generational time to search the space of" possibilities, most of the real evolutionary process occurs away from the sta where the human and the program perform together. The human player " train" the virtual soloist prior to performance, slowly getting fitness valucs ascribed to different musical ideas. This is a labor-intensive process, each in dividual "measure" (a sequence of eight musical events: playa new note, ho ld an old note, rest) having to be evaluated one at a time. Additionally, knowl edge of the dynamics and history of jazz become crucial at the level of the dc sign of the program itself. An example is the tradition of "trading fours " or " trading eights" which provides a structure for the program itself. As the all thor writes:
One of the most exciting traditions in jazz is the chase chorus, where solo iSIS tr,\(k fours or eights. The rhythm section plays the form of the tune as he would for a full chorus solo, but the soloists take turns improvising, changing off every four mca\ UI (' \ ... or every eight m easures. This typically gets competitive, with each soloist Iryin g 1\1 lop the previous one. A good tactic is to mine the previous soloist's four for a m 'Inti il idea and refine that idea for the next four. This requires good ears, a quick mind , ,llIti nimble fingers to pull it off well, but the results are impressive. GenJam acco mpli \ lt t" this one-upmanship by listening to the human performer's last four through il pil l II lo-MIDI converter, mapping wh at is heard as the chromosome structure it uses 101 01 phrase and four measures, possibly mutating those chromosomes, and playing III '1 ,I', 11 its next four. 6

the process will resemble more that of animal breeding (that is, artificial evolution) than natural evolution, where fitness criteria are not given in advance and tend to change over time, as when a predator and its prey engage in an arms race and change the very rules of the game with every innovation in defensive or offensive adaptations. Performing the sorting function personally has the advantage that the full complexity and ambiguity of an artist's aesthetic criteria may be brought to bear on the process. Sound sequences that may offer only a faint promise of working may be left in the population for a while, and cliche repetitions that could invade the whole sonic community may be weeded out early. At any rate, the artist's own sense of what works may be allowed to change as he or she experiences the results. The problem with this approach is that it is not only tedious-each sequence of sounds of each generation must be heard and judged-but also time consuming, given that there is no way of speeding evolution up or leaving the system to evolve on its own for long stretches of time. The other possibility, to encode the fitness criteria into a computer program, lifts these limitations, but it has the drawback offorcing the creator into deciding in advance the kind of music that will evolve. In Vox Populi, for example, several fitness criteria are used, two of which are "melodic fitness" and "harmonic fitness," based on the notion of consonance, or how pleasing a combination of two simultaneous notes is judged by a listener. 5 Although there are solid technical ways of specifying the degree of consonance of two sounds (by measuring the degree of overlap of the harmonic series components of their fundamental notes), it seems clear that judgments of harmony are highly culturally dependent, so that implementing them as code reduces the search space to that of a particular culture. There may be solutions to these limitations, such as combining the best fea tures of personal and automatic fitness judgments. Instead of a single fitness checking program there may be, for example, several such programs (som e based on consonance, some on dissonance, and so on), which the artist may let run on their own for a while, or stop and switch to manual mode for a few generations, or even allow the code of the fit ness criteria to itself becom e a replicator, its evolution influenced by the artist's own past choices. These il r ' now questions involving the design of the user interface of the program, questions whose answers determine how an ar list lila)' inl el,let with the evo luti on 11 1 \ j 11 where th e artis l ary process. For some purposes slI ch

In this case, knowledge of a certain jazz tradition has influenced the desigll 01 the program in that it needs to evolve two populations, one of measures alld one of phrases (pointers to four individuals in the measure populal ion ) ill order to be good at the chase chorus game. But more crucially, the hilily for innovation and creativity falls squarely on the mutation opel 01 1 01, wh ich cannot be a simple stochastic flipper of ones to zeros. In partill il,ll , Ihi s operator cannot produce random changes but must confine the ' P,I e to the area of mu sica ll y mea nin gful sequences. In othe r word s) 1 ",llhl"1

Manuel DeLanda The Virtual Breed ing of Sound

than operating at the bit level (flipping a digit in a MIDI sequence) it operates at the musical event level, implementing several standard melodic development techniques, such as transposition, retrograde, rotation, inversion, sorting, and retrograde-inversion . The only random aspect about these mutations is which of these alternative techniques is used at anyone point.? What this shows is that despite the fact that genetic algorithms have become a standard piece of software, artists themselves must become involved in the implementation of the details of the programs they use because only they can b ring specific kn owledge of their particular field to bear on the design of the different components of the algorithm. To conclude this brief essay I must add that besides the extra resources which musicians themselves must bring there are certain philosophical resources, which are also crucial if the search spaces explored by genetic algorithms are to be rich enough to yield surprising outcomes. These other resources are more general and thus apply to any artistic use of virtual evolution, whether the product is musical, pictorial, architectural, and so on. O ne of these key philosophical ideas may be explained using biological evolution as an example. As we are vertebrates, the arch itecture of our bodies makes us part of the phylum "chordata." The term "phylum" refers to a branch in the evolutionary tree (the first bifurcation after animal and plan t "kingdoms"), but it also carries the idea of a shared body-plan, a kind of "abstract vertebrate" which, if folded and curled in particular sequences during embryogenesis, yields an elephant; twisted and stretched in another sequence yields a giraffe; and in yet other sequences of operations yields snakes, eagles, sharks, and humans. To put this differently, there are "abstract vertebrate" design elements, such as the tetrapod limb, which may be realized in structures as disparate as the single digit limb of a horse, the wing of a bird, or the hand with opposing thumb of a human. Given that the proportions of each of these limbs, as well as the number and shape of digits, are variable, their commOI1 body-plan cannot include any of these details. In other words, whereas th e form of the final product (an actual horse, bird, or human) does have specifi c lengths, areas, and volumes, the body-plan cannot possibly be defined in these terms but must b e abs trac t enough to be compatibl e with a myriad combina tion of th ese properties. Gilles Delcuze uses th e terlll "a b, trac t di<lgr<lm" (or " vir tu <l l multipli cit y") to refer to cn tili c, li ke 111,' vt lkhr,ll c hody plan, but hi s once pt also in cludes th e " hod } , III 11'"1 1I1 1,llI i, l'lIlili cs li ke clouds o r '. n10lll1 t,l in s. paintin g', (lr IllII , il.1I I 1111'1 It 1 11 1 ',," '.11 11

What kind of theoretical resources do we need to be able to think aboui these abstract diagrams? In mathematics the kind of spaces in which term, like " length" or "area" are fundamental notions are call ed "metric spaces," the familiar Euclidean geometry being one example of this class. (Non Euclidean geometries, using curved instead of flat spaces, are also met ri ".) On the other hand, there are geometries, such as differential geometry or 10 pology, where these notions are not basic since these geometries possess ope r ations that do not preserve lengths or areas. The operations allowed ill topology, for example, such as stretching without tearing and folding witholll gluing, preserve only a set of very abstract properties. These topological inv,1I i ants (such as the dimensionality of a space, or its connectivity) are precise ly the elements we need in order to think about body-plans (or more gene r.ill y, abstract diagrams) . It is clear that the kind of spatial structure definin g a body plan cannot be metric since embryological operations can prod uce a 1 .1rgl' variety of finished bodies, each with a different metric structure. Thercl()f ,,, body-plans must be topological. The verteb rate search space is incredibly rich precisely because it i, 11111 defined in terms of properties belonging to the final product (fixed k ll (', 1h., or areas) but in a different language. In the musical examples I ga ve hel<1I I', on the other hand, the search space is given al ready in terms of the Illcilldil or harmonic properties of the evolved creatures. It is possibl e, alt hOllgh I do not know how to theorize this yet, that musicians will ha ve 1 star l Ih ill k 0 ing in terms of abstract musical structures where the key properti,., 1 " 01 sound are not those of fixed duration or a fixed wavelength a nd Ih ,' Iii ,.. but rather are something else correspond ing to what we may c;) 11 " lopo loj',1 ,II 1 music," something we cannot hear (much as we cannot see Ih l' 1()I'(ll llgl c<l l vertebrate) but which would define a rich search space th e fln .II IIItid II I I', of which would be audible. In turn, this implies representing wilhill Iii, ' computer something like the complex embryologica l wli illl 111 .1 1' the genes (the genotype) into bodily traits (the phenotype), give n Ih .l l 1111 ', com plex mapping genotype-phenotype is where th e 11 11111 lopological to metric is achieved. Clearly, current uses of gc neli c algO l illilil " di sp l;)y only the tip of an iceberg, the exploration of whi ch will pl' ill .l I' " I.II<c decades. This is a sobering thought, preventing us from being () Vl' ll'li/hll si.ls li c "bo ut our current cap<lbilities of breed ing so und , hUI Silllllll.lIl l'(l Il ', I), il a source of exci tem ' nt il t all the unknolVn domain s W.l il illj\ 10 Ill ' d i"lovc rcd.

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Manuel DeLanda

Notes

Zoom: Minmg Acceleration

I. Peter J. Bentley and David W. Corne, "An Introduction to Creative Evolutionary Systems," in Creative Evolutionary Systems, ed. Peter J. Bentley and David W. Corne (Academic Press, 2002).

2. Artemis Moroni et aI., "Vox Populi: Evolutionary Computation for Music Evolution," in Creative Evolutionary System s, 206.

3. Ibid., 212.

Liminal Product: Frances Dyson and Douglas Kahn

4. Ibid., 208.

5. Ibid., 212.

6. John A. Biles, "GenJam: Evolution of a Jazz Improviser," in Creative Evolutionary Systems, 168 .

7. Ibid., 175.

8. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 141.

Getting out of caves, tunnels, and tombs has preoccupied Western cu Il lIf"l' In I millennia. Western thought itself couldn't function without the verli ca l .Ixi'. which has brute matter, primordiality, misery, or evil at the bottom , alld lir l' spirit, enlightenment, civility, bounty, or uprightness at the top. But whi le ,1\ cent from darkness into light, fro m illusion to reality, from moral de repil ll (iI' to goodness, from weakness to strength, from the undesirable to th ' is the central narrative of almost every tale the West has to tell , whal pll e ll left out is the equally obsessive desire to return to the 10 111 (.... around with its edges, to extract its secrets, to dwell there for ilw h ilt:, .111(1 . (I I course, to escape and do it all over again. This circularity of enl eri ng, {" xilill t'" and reentering describes the birth of the subway. The transit undcrgl"lllilid III the horizontal occasioned the first steam locomotive, built to ir a lll 01 (. II (1111 tunnels, which were mines. Engines entered mines in order to IIII' fuel they would consume in order to make the trip, instin li ve ly 1 I"1 ill t', \'l'II the dark in order to harvest their life blood. The modern subw.lY ti ev(' lojlld from this solipsism. Mines, both literally and metaphorically, have provided a spa ' Wh" Il'ili .ill origins can be retrieved, passages, and ascensions concep lu ali zed, ,lllti Wil ,' II' sublime tautology and paradox can foment. Along with ore Ihcy II.1vl III(I vided cultu re with tragic and fatal narratives for centuries. Un li k' 111 ' ,dil'gw i al ca ve of Pl ato or th e underworld of Orpheus, Ih e mine is nol ,I ]11.11" \11 illusion 0 cupied by unwi ll ing o r unab le 10 esca pe illio 111(' Ii)"ir I