Bob MacCallum's guest appearances

Bob MacCallum

PNAS Science Sessions

Composer Quest: A Songwriting and Music Composition Podcast

Brian Spencer

Angus Deaton

Nina Fedoroff

Abigail Marsh

James Smith

Marius Wernig

Rai Weiss

Anne Case

Randy Schekman

Mark Thiemens

Anthony Vecchiarelli

Yoel Sadovsky

Carolyn Coyne

Vadim Backman

Yatrik Shah

OwlTail

Bob MacCallum explores how music can evolve from noise based on listeners' preferences.

Interview with 2012 Cozzarelli Prize Winner Bob MacCallum

Over the past few years, Bob MacCallum has been focused on one question: can music evolve through natural selection? In this episode of Composer Quest, we discuss Bob’s amazing evolutionary music project, DarwinTunes. In the DarwinTunes experiment/game, participants rate and “mate” short sound loops to breed new musical offspring. Although it started with randomly generated sine waves and noise, the evolved sounds are now surprisingly musical. Also in this episode, we talk about Bob’s scientific analysis of over 70,000 Billboard hit songs from the past half-decade, which has revealed three major revolution years in music history: 1964, 1983, and 1991.

Music Evolution with DarwinTunes Creator Bob MacCallum