LIFE - A story of life, regeneration and music. ————— LIFE is an exercise of musical and cognitive simplicity. The music you will hear will be generated depending on the state of the current world that is printed on your console. You are given only two commands: R - randomly populate the world. G - create a glider. ————— On the beautiful day of Sunday, February 7th, as I was staring at my 100 lines or so of code on miniAudicle, I suddenly realized that I wanted something more special out of my generative machine. In a rush of inspiration and excitement, I decided to try to use the Game of Life as an engine for self-generating music. After spending a good part of the afternoon developing a 8x8 version of life for Chuck, it was finally time to choose how the board would influence the sound. I decided that the sum of alive cells of each respective row would influence the triggering frequency of different drum samples. The 5th row influences how often the kick is played, the 6th row influences the snare, the 7th influences the clap and the bottommost one influences the high hats. All percussion except for the kick drum goes partly through a delay, its mix is influenced by how many cells are alive on the first row. The main element of this composition is a pad combined by 3 saw waveforms and a noise source, a combination that works perfectly wen passed through a low pass filter. The filter frequency is influenced by the number of cells alive in the 4th row. The reverb amount of the pad is modulated by the 3rd row. The 2nd row controls how often the single high triangle wave pluck is triggered. If no cells are alive on that row the pluck won’t play. 808 samples by http://smd-records.com. ————— To run this machine, simply add a shred of the program. An empty world will be created on the console. An empty world has no inhabitants, so only the pad is played, with the filter closed down at 200hZ. To populate the world with random cells, press R. As the lower part of the board in inhabited, the world becomes more vibrant, therefore more percussion is played. The higher half of the board modulates sound effects instead. Eventually the board will either stabilize or die out, as well as the music. For a dramatic effect, you can press R and generate a new population. Otherwise, you can create a Glider on the upper left corner of the board by pressing G, which creates a subtler musical environment.