The tunes embedded above weren’t written by a composer, but fashioned through natural selection. They are the offspring of DarwinTunes, a program which creates bursts of noise that gradually evolve based on the preferences of thousands of human listeners. After hundreds of generations, tracks that are boring and grating soon morph into tunes that are really quite rhythmic and pleasant (even if they won’t be topping charts any time soon).

DarwinTunes is the brainchild of Robert MacCallum and Armand Leroi from Imperial College London. “We suspected that musical styles evolve through Darwinian natural selection,” says MacCallum. “They are copied and modified from artist to artist and generation to generation, with popular styles more likely to be copied as