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)...
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... Show more...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
A 3.5 minute excerpt of the fully generative, never repeating music composition system for Universal Everything's V&A Forever installation in the John Madejski garden of the Victoria & Albert Museum L
SoundCloud
