Conway's Game of Life, but Musical

Summary

A Digital Darwin Adventure with Mating MelodiesHudson Griffith•September 11, 2025IntroductionMusic 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 EvolutionI 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.Evolve GenerationReset PopulationAnd 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 Li...