Game of Life
Articles about Game of Life:
Ableton Live 8: This video demos a Max For Live “Game Of Life” interactive cellular automata note pattern generator.
Code available at 2rem (.zip).
Game Of Life Music Sequencer
The Game of Life Sequencer Bank is based on a game of life sequencer screencast produced by Wesen in 2008. It is a bank of 6 step or drum sequencers that generate patterns based on the basics of Conway’s Game of Life cellular automaton. Each sequencer operates independently of the others, and can be configured in a variety of ways.
The Game of Life Sequencer Bank is written in Java using the Processing, controlP5 and a customized RWMidi library. It should work wherever Java 1.5 is available (Windows, OS X, Linux), though it has only been tested in Windows and Linux.
The Game Of Life Sequencer is a free download.
Raymond May, Jr’s MIDI Game of Life sequencer is a free music sequencer made in the JAVA visual arts IDE and library Processing.
It runs a loop of varying lengths selected by the user through the game of life algorithm. Each cell of the grid represents a pitch. In the current implementation, like colors are the same pitch – cells’ octave can be scaled along the y axis.
This is well suited for generating drum sequences or melodic material on the fly. The sequencer runs live and can be played as an instrument by drawing new cells while the game is running.
MIDI Game of Life is based on the original code by Ruin Wesen and makes use of their RWmidi JAVA/Processing library.
The above video demonstrates the $.99 SonicLife (App Store Link) application for iPhone / iPod Touch, triggering drum samples in Ableton Live with the help of OSCulator.
SonicLife is a creative, interactive controller for iPhone / iPod Touch that sends Open Sound Control messages over a Wi-Fi network using the UDP protocol.
The application runs a simple cellular automaton on a grid of cells. The cells can be interacted with by touch and triggers of three different colors can be placed on the grid. The automaton can be set to five different rule-sets, from classic Game of Life to simple horizontal or vertical stepping. Triggers are fired by “alive” cells and send their state as OSC messages to a configurable host on the same Wi-Fi network. Cells and triggers can be randomized by shaking the device.
More information here.
John Conway’s Game of Life is a classic game, first discussed in a Scientific American article in 1970, that uses simple rule to simulate how different colonies of life evolve. A new plugin, Automaton from Audio Damage, takes these ideas and applies them to the manipulation of sound.
Automaton isn’t the application to bring the Game of Life to music; see our coverage of GlitchDS for discussion of a free cellular automaton music sequencer for the Nintendo DS.
The basic idea of the Game of Life is to start with a simple configuration of counters (organisms), one to a cell, then observe how it changes as you apply Conway’s “genetic laws” for births, deaths, and survivals. Conway chose his rules carefully, after a long period of experimentation, to meet three desiderata:
There should be no initial pattern for which there is a simple proof that the population can grow without limit.
There should be initial patterns that apparently do grow without limit.
There should be simple initial patterns that grow and change for a considerable period of time before coming to end in three possible ways: fading away completely (from overcrowding or becoming too sparse), settling into a stable configuration that remains unchanged thereafter, or entering an oscillating phase in which they repeat an endless cycle of two or more periods.
In brief, the rules should be such as to make the behavior of the population unpredictable.
Here’s a version of the game that you can try in your Web browser:
