Acoustic Artificial Life
Completed. This project led to the master’s thesis Sonorama: An exploration of sonic artificial life by Calvin Guillot Suarez (Aalto University, 2024).
The project was part of the science-art project ‘R,’ which revolves around co-evolution between humans, animals, and technical agents. The acoustic niche hypothesis states that all agents in a shared acoustic ecology evolve to divide the sonic spectrum to allow effective intra-species communication.
The project aims to create multiple artificial life forms that learn to communicate acoustically in urban soundscapes. These artificial agents evolve using evolutionary programming and deep learning techniques to find their acoustic niche. The evolved sonic agents are integral to an artistic soundscape installed in self-driving robotic buses moving self-determined in the Kalasatamaa area in Helsinki.
The final piece was presented in a public installation in August 2023. The technical supervisor was Prof. Sebastian J. Schlecht, and the artistic supervisor was Prof. Laura Beloff.
Related Work
- Krause, B. The Niche Hypothesis: A virtual symphony of animal sounds, the origins of musical expression and the health of habitats. (1993).
- Kadish, D., Risi, S. & Beloff, L. An artificial life approach to studying niche differentiation in soundscape ecology. Artif Life Conf Proc 52–59 (2019) doi:10.1162/isal_a_00140.