Guest editorial: special issue on biologically inspired music, sound, art and design

Abstract

The idea of using evolutionary computation for artistic purposes can be traced back to Dawkins. In his 1987 book, The Blind Watchmaker [1], Dawkins presents a program that allows the evolution of the morphology of ‘‘virtual creatures’’. The user guides the genetic algorithm, indicating the favorite biomorphs, avoiding the need to develop a fitness function. Using a similar approach, the seminal works of Sims [2], where genetic programming was used to evolve populations of images, and of Todd and Latham [3], where evolutionary techniques are used to evolve 3D forms with organic appearance, led to the emergence of a new research area, evolutionary art, which is characterized by the use of nature-inspired computing for artistic purposes. At the same time, early works in the field of evolutionary music explored the development of hard-wired functions [4] and of artificial neural networks [5] to assign fitness. Soon afterwards, Baluja et al. [6] applied artificial neural networks to guide the evolution of images. As is often the case in new research areas, particularly interdisciplinary ones, the first years were characterized by individual efforts and uncoordinated research, which often led to the reinvention of the wheel. This problem was amplified by the lack of scientific events specifically dedicated to the area, which led to the publication of these early efforts in generic evolutionary computation, artificial intelligence, neural networks or computer music conferences and journals.