Abstract
The concept of universal Darwinism extends the tenets of Darwinian evolution to spheres beyond the purely biological. One such sphere is culture, itself composed of evolving agencies called memes, as studied by the field of memetics. Their evolution comes by virtue of iterating heredity, variation, and selection, known together as the evolutionary algorithm. As a subset of culture, music exemplifies memetic behavior, and can be studied under memetics via the concept of the museme, or musical meme. Memes exist in the brains of individuals, wherein they participate in neural ecologies that shape up cognition. These ecologies are themselves embedded within more historically stable tiers entailing different scales of magnitude and rates of change, a system of which constitutes the collective musical enterprise. Musical notation, the bulk of which was developed during the Middle Ages, is pivotal among these tiers, as it facilitated musical evolvability: an evolved capacity for evolving. Along similar preoccupations, this investigation is part of a two-part project that also includes a composition for orchestra by myself called Terrarium, created from the genetic data of agents in a virtual ecosystem, as well as data from other elements in their environment, which I programmed using C# and the Unity platform.