Applying evolutionary computing methods to generate art and music has been used by artists and composers for many years. Beatnik is an application that uses this approach to generate drum patterns. The drum machine is aiming at laymen: musically illiterate users can manipulate a set of suggested beats by evaluation. Selection functions and genetic operators are applied on the beats. Over time the process of evaluation leads to drum patterns conforming the taste and vision of the user.
Beatnik was programmed in Java and realized in the course of the ‘Research Seminar Artificial Intelligence’ of the Media Technology MSc programme at Leiden University.
