Musical DNA that lives, breathes and evolves. The Blind Music Maker creates musical beings that adapt and mutate based on survival parameters you control. Guide their evolution and discover sounds that emerge naturally.
Musical DNA that lives, breathes and evolves. The Blind Music Maker creates musical beings that adapt and mutate based on survival parameters you control. Guide their evolution and discover sounds that emerge naturally.
Our prototype is fully functional and ready to evolve beyond the laboratory. We're seeking creative partners - museums, festivals, galleries - to bring The Blind Music Maker into immersive, public experiences.
Imagine a room-sized installation where visitors collectively shape a musical ecosystem through touch interfaces, watching as sound creatures adapt in real-time. Visual projections could mirror the musical evolution - colors, patterns, and forms that grow and change alongside the sounds. Robotic instruments might bring these digital beings into the physical world, creating an orchestra that truly lives and breathes.
For educational spaces, we see powerful potential in making evolution tangible and playful. Visitors discover how selection pressure works, how mutations drive change, and how environments shape life - all through the universal language of music.
We're three Rotterdam-based musicians who got curious about what happens when you let music evolve like living organisms.
It started when Jorn read Richard Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker" and couldn't stop wondering what musical evolution might sound like. He assembled a team with two colleagues who shared his fascination: Bas, a full-stack developer and professional bassist who bridges the gap between code and music, and Daan, who teaches Live Electronics at the conservatory and specializes in generative music and digital audio design.
Together, we're driven by pure curiosity - we genuinely don't know what our musical creatures will become, and that childlike excitement keeps us experimenting. We've been collaborating with evolutionary biologists to get fresh perspectives beyond just the musical viewpoint.
We're serious about the craft, playful about the process, and ready to see where musical evolution takes us next.
At its heart, The Blind Music Maker works with musical DNA - MIDI data that contains all the essential genetic information: pitch, rhythm, timing, and dynamics. We chose MIDI because computers can easily analyze and manipulate this digital musical language, whether it's played back through software synthesizers, hardware, or even robotic instruments.
Here's how evolution happens: Starting with an initial melody, our system creates multiple "children" by randomly mutating the original. These mutations can be subtle - changing a single note's pitch or timing - or more dramatic, like duplicating entire sections or deleting parts completely.
But here's where it gets interesting: instead of you having to listen to every mutation and pick favorites (which would be exhausting), the system uses customizable fitness functions - scoring mechanisms that automatically evaluate each musical creature. Want more tonal music? There's a parameter for that. Prefer complex rhythms? Another slider adjusts survival odds for rhythmically adventurous creatures.
In our current version, five musical creatures evolve simultaneously, each developing their own unique characteristics. You can switch between them to hear how different evolutionary paths are unfolding, and track their progress through a live scoreboard that shows which creature is excelling at which parameters - maybe one is becoming more melodic while another grows rhythmically complex.
The magic happens in the selection process. Each generation, the highest-scoring mutation becomes the parent for the next round of evolution. You're not composing directly - you're designing the environment that shapes how your musical ecosystem develops. Adjust the survival parameters, and watch as your creatures adapt in real-time.
The system runs continuously, with each loop representing a new generation. Multiple generations can evolve during a single cycle, meaning your musical DNA can travel quite far from its origins in just a few minutes. It's digital natural selection, but for sound.
Got a question, collab idea, or just want to say hi? Drop us a note at info@theblindmusicmaker.com and we’ll get back to you.