I agree, ORCA, cool as it is, is not a 2d CA system. It’s a livecoding environment that happens to be laid out on a grid.
Less concepts is the most prominent CA example on lines, but it’s 1d.
Anything based on Conway’s game of life is interesting from the point of view of seeing how people try to interpret points in 2d space as music or sound, but the CA itself was not conceived with music in mind, so it’s an odd fit.
For things that fit the bill more closely in this space, you might look at grd: grd | norns community. Grd works with a 2d state, at least. I suspect, though, that when you dig under the hood you’ll find that the underlying CA is 1d, but I’m not sure. It’s an interesting script, though, because the author takes CA as a composition tool very seriously.
And of course, depending on how you look at it, arcologies might be seen as a dedicated 2d musical CA script: arcologies | norns community. OK, maybe not a CA in any strict sense, but it is an interesting example of thinking about how objects in a 2d space might represent sound.
And finally, as another example of representing data in 2d as sound, there’s overwintering: https://norns.community/overwintering. Seriously beautiful.
Thinking about all of these examples, it seems as if the most significant challenge is coming up with a CA that grows/changes in musically interesting ways, instead of just devolving into randomness and/or noise. I think that grd and overwintering are good examples of tackling that question.
