the genetic basis of electronic music

In contemporary times, musical instruments have become archaic, and now all music is produced electronically. As all sound is digitized, I find the mirroring between genetics and music very relevant because it has become such an integral part of culture. Technology has allowed contemporary musicians the ability to dissect and map out sounds by dividing them up into tiny pieces of digital information, similar to alleles, genes, and chromosomes coded together to comprise a larger entity.

I myself have even used these programs such as Reason and Pro Tools to make tribal house, and take great pleasure in how music production can now be made available to everyone. Technology has provided humans facility of expression, and in a sense added a communist spin to music- if you truly are an expert in any genre of music then all you need is your aesthetic, and then the music you produce will be wildly successful. Just like it costs merely $1,000 to get your genome sequenced, anybody can now produce music.

Listening to contemporary music is like a study in population genetics. Sounds have been reduced to gene regulation, and are spliced together to make up a song. Essentially, if a sound is pleasing enough to the current aesthetics and collective consciousness, that sound will survive and be perpetuated, and if that sound is super appealing it will soon become ubiquitous because that sound is the best fit. Much like natural selection, music that currently is produced either dies or survives by those willing to listen to it.

Conversely, genetic drift does apply to techno. Much like the seemingly infinite genetic variation in humans, there will always be a place for all sounds even if they are not omnipresent in contemporary music. Essentially genetic drift still applies in face of natural section, which allows those sounds not catchy enough to be pop music to perpetuate themselves over time. As more time passes it's easy to observe these trends in music.

It's like I often say to myself, that if you like a song the good news is that you will probably hear it over and over again over the years- remixed and sampled. I especially appreciate cross genre sampling, although contemporary monoculture really means there is only one type of music. If you yourself are confused about exactly what it is in your favorite music that gets you, simply use Pandora's Music Genome Project to identify which attributes of music are appealing to you most.