I Made a Fruit Fly Make Music 🎶 This Is What Happened.

With the recent digitization of the Drosophila (fruit fly) connectome, you may have seen experiments where this biological neural network is used to perform various tasks. I applied this same fundamental idea to music: I embedded an actual fruit fly connectome into a custom generative music composition system. 🔗 Read More: https://ozgymusic.com/articles/i-made-a-fruit-fly-compose-music-heres-what-happened 🚫 What It Doesn't Do This is not a bio-sonification project. In other words, I am not directly translating the fly's neuronal activity into sound, note frequencies, or rhythm. There is no simple mapping like "one neuron = one note" or "one signal = one sound." ⚙️ How It Works At the heart of the system lies the actual FlyWire connectome. The structure I use consists of 8,192 neurons selected from the FAFB v783 dataset and the recorded synaptic connections between them. However, the connectome alone does not understand music theory. That is why I incorporated musical knowledge and a composition mechanism into the system as a separate layer. - FlyWire Connectome: The biological neural network acts as a neural computational substrate during the composition process, influencing how musical decisions are explored and selected. - Musical Knowledge: The system utilizes information such as pitch, intervals, note durations, rhythm, velocity, tempo, tonality, chords, motifs, and musical patterns. This knowledge provides a musical structure and a probability space for the composition process. - Composition and Search: The system does not simply generate a single composition and stop. It creates multiple musical candidates, evaluates them, and carries the stronger results over to subsequent generations to explore new variations. - MasterCritic: The generated candidates... It is evaluated based on various criteria such as harmony, melody, rhythm, form, style, novelty, tension, voice leading, and learned musical coherence. Thus, the result is not merely the conversion of random neural activity into sound. A real biological connectome operates within the same system as existing musical knowledge and the composition mechanism; candidates are generated, evaluated, and refined over successive generations. In other words, the phrase "fruit fly composed music" in the title does not imply, in a scientific sense, that the fly consciously wrote music. However, it does mean that a real biological connectome can be utilized as part of a creative computational process. And that is precisely where the actual experiment begins. #fruitfly #fruitflyexperiment #fruitflymusic #fruitflyai #fruitflygame

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