Project Name: “Hyperwire”
Medium: Max4Live
An experimental sequencer I built for Max4Live based off a cellular automata known as “WireWorld”
Download: Hyperwire-Release
Hey! Sorry for the delay in responding. Yeah! You can totally use cellular automata or the likes to generate music. The basic gist is that a “current state informs a subsequent state” and from there you create rules on what the next state should be.
Cellular automata historically use graphics to display this change in state (i.e. conway’s game of life), but there’s nothing to prevent you from using any other kind of input to generate an output.
i.e. you could do something as abstract as saying: if the current note is C in the piano instrument, and none of the previous 4 notes were a D, then make the next note a D. If the current duration is a half note, and one of the previous durations was an eigth note, make the next duration a quarter note. etc.
You can stack these simple rules to generate complex outcomes and rules that will, at some point, come to a stasis point. Then, at that point, or even before!, you can perturb the system to generate new patterns.
It’s a pretty involved/cool thing and you can get some neat textures and ideas out of it.
I like this line of thinking. Any examples of doing something like this?