Economic (un)natural selection

Version 3.2 Unnatural Selection: A new formal approach to punctuated equilibrium in economic systems

Generalized Darwinian evolutionary theory has emerged as central to the description of economic process (e.g., Aldrich et al., 2008). Here we demonstrate that, just as Darwinian principles provide necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for understanding the dynamics of social entities, in a similar manner the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory provide another set of necessary co...

Iterative unit selection with unnatural prosody detection

Corpus-driven speech synthesis is hampered by the occurrence of occasional glitches which ruin the impression of the whole utterance. We propose an iterative unit selection integrated with an unnatural prosody detection model to identify any unnatural prosody. The system searches an optimal path in the lattice, verifies its naturalness by the unnatural prosody model and replaces the bad section...

Natural and Unnatural Selection in a Wild Goose

Generative Music for Live Musicians: An Unnatural Selection

An Unnatural Selection is a generative musical composition for conductor, eight live musicians, robotic percussion, and Disklavier. It was commissioned by Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble, and premiered in May 2014. Music for its three movements is generated live: the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material is based upon analysis of supplied corpora. The traditionally notated music is displa...

Unnatural Selection: Seeing Human Intelligence in Artificial Creations

As generative AI systems grow in sophistication, so too do our expectations of their outputs. For as automated systems acculturate themselves to ever larger sets of inspiring human examples, the more we expect them to produce human-quality outputs, and the greater our disappointment when they fall short. While our generative systems must embody some sense of what constitutes human creativity if...