Cellular automata are really wonderful/powerful and have so many not widely used applications, also in music... E.g. you can use 1D CAs to generate melodies/phrases and rhythm patterns which have order, but also somewhat feel random...

(For the image below I used demo.thi.ng/umbrella/wolfram/ with rule 123467 — the output from this demo is just text, so you can just select all and copy/paste into a text file...)

Using a 1D CA, you can map each row/generation to a time step and each column to a note in a chosen musical scale (here I used Cminor, and the pattern covers 2 octaves, 4 bars). This gives you a piano roll type setup (you could also use a much wider pattern and use a microtonal approach, sky's the limit...) The non-highlighted columns/cells are ignored. If two neighboring cells (in your scale) are active at the same time you can filter notes based on priority (here the opacity of the pink bars/notes) to drop one of them to avoid disharmony (if needed)...

I've built a much more elaborate system around this basic approach for an installation piece which ran for 3 months and non-stop composed ever changing music (only controlled by dozens of macro parameters to guide the overall composition arcs). For that I also used secondary/tertiary CAs to transition the note selection CA between different patterns, rules, tempos, timescales, key changes and instruments...

An 3 minute example output from that system is here (more info there too):
soundcloud.com/toxi/va-forever…

All different melodies in this piece are directly or indirectly based on the approach described above...

#CellularAutomata #MusicTheory #Composition #GenerativeArt

MonochromeEvolutionaryBioDigitalCellularAutomataSimulation

Unlike the recently shared[1] multi-cellular struggles, these here are some selected research stills (handpicked from tens of thousands) of only single CA configurations (aka mono-cultures) which I found interesting/promising and which were then used as raw ingredients/candidates for my infinitely evolving C-SCAPE project[2]...

Each of these cellular automata is 1.5D, meaning each pixel row is one generation, but I allowed the neighborhoods to be flexible, larger (potentially discontinuous), and in some cases extended to enable access to cell states in previous generations (i.e. a form of temporal short term memory). This leads to all sorts of much more interesting and complex outcomes than "traditional" (aka textbook) 1-dimensional CA setups...

More details in the readme of the related open source project:
thi.ng/cellular

[1] mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/11552640…
[2] art.thi.ng/c-scape

#MonochromeMonday #TextureTuesday #AbstractArt #EvolutionaryArt #GenerativeArt #CellularAutomata #Noise #Texture #CSCAPE #ThingUmbrella #NoAI #TypeScript