Posted: Nov 11, 2015 6:35 pm
Some time ago, while a thread I was contributing to was locked for review, I wrote a paper titled: On the Origin of Ideas: The Evolutionary Theory of Ideas, as Developed Though the Study of Religious Ideas (and Why I'm a Theist). I started a thread to discuss that paper. The ideas discussed in that thread motivated me to attempt to put some of them to actual use in a domain that was bounded enough to be practical to work with and yet expansive enough to be interesting and challenging. I chose guitar blues licks because that domain fit my criteria, I'm interested in it, and I thought it would be fun. I suppose this thread could be titled: The Evolutionary Theory of Ideas, as Developed Though the Study of Blues Ideas (and Why Clapton is God) – but I won't do that. 
This thread will discuss the work I've done and present new work as it develops – over time. The ultimate goal is to develop a heuristic that will take in an initial set of blues licks, some guidance on the evolutionary space to explore along with a fitness function and then output a new set of licks evolved from the founder set through multiple generations.
The project is eclectic in that it involves music theory, especially as it applies to lead blues guitar, music engraving (because I want input and output to be formatted in standard lead blues guitar music notation), computer programing, artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms/heuristics, and evolution of ideas (memes if you prefer) – and who knows what else ...
I'm hoping that this thread can be of interest to anyone who is curious about any of those topics. You don't need to be an expert in any or all of them – I'm certainly not.
If your only interested in lead guitar playing then you could focus on that aspect of the thread, suggest input set licks, explain how you go about developing your own licks etc.. Maybe even play some of the licks presented.
If you're interested in computer programing of this sort but you know nothing about guitar playing or blues then no worries, I plan to give a blues primer and explain the music notation involved. If you know nothing about music theory and always wanted to learn then that's ok too because we can cover that as we go. And we seem to have a lot of musicians as forum members, perhaps one of them could start a thread teaching music theory.
If you're interested in serious study of evolution then I'm hoping you can help me develop the naive evolutionary principles I'm using into something more developed.
I'll end the kick-off post with an example of what I'm talking about. Here's an output example of a simple one generation run. I input 16 different licks (each lick is one or two bars long), they are numbered on the top left of each lick. The program outputs the original set followed by various mutations of that set. Some of the mutations are simple changes to the original lick, some mutations (where you see a “+” ) are the offspring of the merger of two different licks. Each lick is output in standard music notation as well as Tab. Tab is a notation for guitar players. Unlike a piano, you can play the same note in multiple places on a guitar and Tab tells you exactly where to play. I'll explain all of this in more detail in future posts but I thought this example would be helpful to give the idea of what I'm going on about.
Edit: I thought an example of actual blues licks in action might be useful too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_rRJIAQapg
This thread will discuss the work I've done and present new work as it develops – over time. The ultimate goal is to develop a heuristic that will take in an initial set of blues licks, some guidance on the evolutionary space to explore along with a fitness function and then output a new set of licks evolved from the founder set through multiple generations.
The project is eclectic in that it involves music theory, especially as it applies to lead blues guitar, music engraving (because I want input and output to be formatted in standard lead blues guitar music notation), computer programing, artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms/heuristics, and evolution of ideas (memes if you prefer) – and who knows what else ...
I'm hoping that this thread can be of interest to anyone who is curious about any of those topics. You don't need to be an expert in any or all of them – I'm certainly not.
If your only interested in lead guitar playing then you could focus on that aspect of the thread, suggest input set licks, explain how you go about developing your own licks etc.. Maybe even play some of the licks presented.
If you're interested in computer programing of this sort but you know nothing about guitar playing or blues then no worries, I plan to give a blues primer and explain the music notation involved. If you know nothing about music theory and always wanted to learn then that's ok too because we can cover that as we go. And we seem to have a lot of musicians as forum members, perhaps one of them could start a thread teaching music theory.
If you're interested in serious study of evolution then I'm hoping you can help me develop the naive evolutionary principles I'm using into something more developed.
I'll end the kick-off post with an example of what I'm talking about. Here's an output example of a simple one generation run. I input 16 different licks (each lick is one or two bars long), they are numbered on the top left of each lick. The program outputs the original set followed by various mutations of that set. Some of the mutations are simple changes to the original lick, some mutations (where you see a “+” ) are the offspring of the merger of two different licks. Each lick is output in standard music notation as well as Tab. Tab is a notation for guitar players. Unlike a piano, you can play the same note in multiple places on a guitar and Tab tells you exactly where to play. I'll explain all of this in more detail in future posts but I thought this example would be helpful to give the idea of what I'm going on about.
Edit: I thought an example of actual blues licks in action might be useful too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_rRJIAQapg