#1

Conway Music

Conway’s Game of Life makes music with your grid.

  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies as if caused by underpopulation.
  2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
  3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies as if by overpopulation.
  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
  5. Each generation, the row with the highest sum gets to play their assigned note.

Requirements

  • grid
  • M4L

Documentation

Drop in an instrument, seed your grid, and press play.

The Game of Life is deterministic, so the same starting pattern will always yield the same music: entire songs can be contained with a simple seed.

Download

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#2

Interesting! I dig non-typical sequencers like this. It reminds me of one of the factory devices in Native Instruments Reaktor, the Newscool. Here’s a nice article on it:
http://alijamieson.co.uk/2016/05/25/reaktors-newscool/

2 Likes
#3

Oh wow, this is a really cool implementation. Thank you for sharing.