A Digital Darwin Adventure with Mating Melodies

Introduction

Music is profoundly human. It runs deep in our lives and shows up in our everyday rituals. And somehow, those rituals often end with us leaving AirPods in the back seat of an Uber. But beneath the everyday habits lies a much older connection. Neuroscience research shows our brains respond to music in fundamental ways that precede language development 1. And what fascinates me is how naturally music evolves over time, how styles adapt and change in a way that feels less like something we purposely create and more like it just grows on its own. Charles Darwin himself speculated that musicality might have preceded language, suggesting our capacity for music is fundamentally biological 2.

This got me thinking: if musical evolution follows biological patterns, could we create an environment to simulate this evolution? So I built one.

Building a Laboratory for Musical Evolution

I created what I call a melody breeder. It’s a digital playground where melodies can compete, reproduce, and evolve. Select your favorite (up to three) melodies, let them breed with each other, and watch what happens. It may not be the next top hit, but it's a lot of fun to play around with.

And the science behind it is actually pretty solid. Richard Dawkins' concept of "memes" describes cultural units that replicate and evolve similarly to genes 3. Musical melodies are perfect examples. They replicate through listening, mutate through sampling, and undergo selection pressure based on whether people actually want to hear them again.

Research by Savage et al. (2015) demonstrates that musical evolution follows predictable patterns across cultures, with structural features evolving through descent with modification much like biological traits 4. That means you can think of your Spotify Liked Songs playlist as a thriving ecosystem, full of tracks that survived.

Conway's Symphony of Life and Death

While building the melody breeder, I kept thinking about how musical patterns behave like living systems. They're born, they interact, they die. This reminded me of one of my favorite digital visualizations, Conway's Game of Life.

So I made it musical.

This is Conway's Game of Life, where each cell birth plays a harmonic note and each death plays a complementary tone. The result is evolving, unpredictable music generated by the simulation.

Each glider that moves across the screen creates its own melody. Oscillators turn into rhythms and the "glider gun" becomes a beat machine. The same simple rules that drive complexity in biology can also shape musical structure.

From Musical Genes to Cultural Pandemics

The parallels between musical evolution and biological systems run deeper than you'd think.

Take the Labubu phenomenon (I never thought I would write that phrase in a blog post). These designer toys went from obscure to everywhere seemingly overnight, spreading through social media like a disease. And I mean that literally, epidemiologists use the same models for viral TikTok trends as they do for actual viruses 5. To show this, I pulled Google Trends data 6 on the term "Labubu" from the start of 2024 to today and visualized it as a global map of its spread.

Watching this trend curve reminds me of the pandemic era. The same steep exponential rises, the geographic spread patterns, the way interest peaks and then gradually declines. It's unsettling how similar a toy's popularity looks to a virus outbreak when you plot them on a map.

But maybe that similarity isn't so unsettling after all. Maybe it reveals something deeper about how information spreads through human networks, whether that information is genetic code, viral particles, or cultural ideas.

The Universal Patterns of Cultural Evolution

Darwin called it "endless forms most beautiful," and that phrase fits here too. The same simple rules that drive biology also explain why culture produces such variety, from music to memes. Patterns replicate, adapt, and survive when they capture our attention.

Boyd & Richerson describe culture as a shared pool of innovation that helps us live better 7. Sometimes that means a symphony, sometimes a viral monster toy. Either way, it's evolution at work.

These patterns exist all around us, but recognizing them is just the beginning. What really gets me excited is being able to build something that makes these invisible forces visible.

Why I Love Code

This whole exploration exists because programming gave me the tools to turn random shower thoughts into something real and shareable. There's something empowering about writing code that simulates generations of evolution in milliseconds, about building systems that let people explore complex ideas through play.

This is why I code: to take questions that keep me up at night and turn them into something that might spark curiosity in the 5 people who read these blog posts.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to check on my melody breeder. Pretty sure Beethoven's Fifth great-grandson just evolved into Baby Shark.