I selected this book to review because of its title--it was so unusual, I just had to find out more. I am glad that I chose it. When I taught computer science (CS) and chaired a university department, I advocated the proposition that computing is a mainstream arts-and-sciences discipline, despite the historical and intellectual associations to engineering and business information systems. This book validates the position I took and the choice many of my students made by majoring in applied computing and minoring in art or music. I plan to return to this book again and again--it is worth the attention.

The book is a compilation of papers and essays by computer scientists, psychologists, practicing artists, designers, and musicians who have applied the theory and techniques of evolutionary computation to the visual arts, design, and music. The ideas, examples, and writing are of uniformly high quality. Each contribution is well documented with references to the primary literature and Web sources.

There are 19 individual chapters grouped into five larger parts: “Evolutionary Art,” “Evolutionary Music,” “Real-World Applications,” “Artistic Perspectives,” and “Future Perspectives.”

Some sample chapters in each of the major groupings give an idea of the types of topics covered. John Collomosse’s chapter on evolutionary art, “Evolutionary Search for the Artistic Rendering of Photographs,” discusses how a photograph can be computationally turned into a work that appears to have been produced by an artist’s brush--colors and brush strokes. Chapter 6, “Evolutionary Computing for Expressive Music Performance” by Ramirez et al., tackles the problem of musical expression in jazz, an inherently more difficult problem than in classical music. Charlie Frowd and Peter Hancock use evolutionary techniques to produce realistic human faces in chapter 9, “Evolving Human Faces.” The origins of the work lie in the poor results usually found in the drawings of criminal suspects that are based on the descriptions of witnesses and victims. Part 4 has the widest intellectual diversity, spanning a survey of virtual ecosystems by Alan Dorin to a provocative manifesto on complexism by artist Philip Galanter. Part 5 includes four chapters that culminate in a paper on human-machine creativity by Jon McCormack. McCormack’s paper includes a list and critical analysis of open problems and grand challenges in evolutionary art and music.

A bundled DVD with additional software and examples keyed to the chapters, plus a set of extra software and Web sites, is included.