Rich French 3/2/13 Advisor: Kristina Striegnitz

 A cell is “born” if it is surrounded by 2 neighbors  A cell “survives” if it is surrounded by 2 or 3 neighbors  Else, the cell dies or remains dead

 Simply extend the lines to another space and you have a grid!  If a quarter note is played, “alive” and if there is no note played “dead”

 The goal of our project is to create a musical representation for CAs that emphasizes the different features inherent in a musical piece  If the songs generated are interesting, then this might shed light on the possibilities of computers to do high level tasks like music composition.

 Life  We need rules that are sparse yet complex  Some rules include, Seeds (B2), AntiLife (B /S ), HighLife (B36/S23)  Excitable medium  K states, if state is g, g either stays the same or Turns into g+1 state

 Melody  Scales  Note placement  Song structure  Rhythm

 Eduardo Miranda’s CAMUS system  Cartesian Representation: x and y designate half steps from a base note  Problem: Note order arbitrary, not much variety for note placement  Serquera and Chareyron alter sounds at the wave-level  Problem: Too open ended, not all sound waves necessarily translate to music

 Layered CA system like CAMUS system  The entire CA representation represents a song  Melody is represented by a Life Automaton

 Each vertical column is a note or rest  Notes grouped horizontally can be grouped together to form longer notes  The smallest length a note can be is 1/16  Horizontal length of the automaton is 16*# of measures

 Excitable medium CAs represent the other components of the piece  Note Placement (Blank spaces are arbitrary)  16 states, For each note of 2 or more cells, a change of state from left to right designates a note separation.

 Excitable medium CAs represent the other components of the piece  Scale (if yellow = C Major):  # of states = # of scales, the most represented scale for each column will be the current scale played

High Life (B36/S23)

 Golly: Open source CA program, allows PERL scripting  Allows for layering, very robust support of different CA rules  MIDI Perl: Perl module for creating MIDI files  Simple interface, with all the MIDI features needed.

 We just finished the experiment, and are working to make it work on all platforms.  However, just listening to one or a few of the songs, it’s clear that something is amiss

 Murphy’s Law: When you create a system open enough to create a wide variety of songs, you create opportunity for a wide variety of failure.  Uncanny Valley: When songs have musical elements, but it doesn’t come together with the same results of a human composer.  Possible changes to the software: Make the system more rigid, make it so there are less opportunities to sound strange. Add instrumentation.