Nice job. I thought about building something like this many years ago, but ended up experimenting with music generated from abelian sand pile algorithms instead. I've seen a number of attempts at using genetic algorithms to recombine previous musical patterns.

What's obviously missing is a "fitness function" that can approximate the equivalent of human taste, so the final evolved forms just end up being widely random in terms of quality.

AlgoMotion also did a video explanation for a music based version of Conway's Game of Life last year. Highly recommend their videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2SjVwYNr54

Incidentally if you like musical toys like this - Electroplankton [1] was a fun little game that had a series of almost organic musical instruments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroplankton

I had very high hopes, because I have initially read: "Conway's Game of Life, but A Musical". Still pretty cool!

The demo sounds lovely. Thought I’d mention that for the Eurorack synthesizer format there is a 16 cell sequencer by NLC: https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/modules/p/cellular-automat...

Wolfram Tones uses 1-d cellular automata to generate music. I had a lot of fun playing with this many years ago.

https://tones.wolfram.com/ (not sure if it's still up, doesn't load for me)

I love this stuff. This 256 byte video clip is a great example using similar principles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8

There is a MIDI sequencer called ZOA (for Apple devices) that does a very similar job. I had a lot of fun with it, combining it with synthesisers (I have bunch of them but my fave is Moog's) inside AUM.

https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/zoa-living-midi-sequencer/id15...

Oh this is cool. I did something similar with a modded Launchpad by programming GOL on it and converting the positions by column and row to octave and degree and then outputting MIDI to a synth.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/os4nF1RoPJCwNiLt6

musical space with 12 notes per octave may be better mapped onto a hexagon grid rather than a square one

https://www.whatistoday.net/2019/09/jammer.html

I made a musical game of life not long ago if you want something to play with https://matthewbilyeu.com/tone-of-life

gonna have a panic attack at the twinkle twinkle "star" not being a half-note.

Pretty cool! How do you decide what tone to play on birth/death? Is it based on the position in the grid or do you just pick from a simple scale at random?

Very cool Hudson.

“each cell birth plays a harmonic note and each death plays a complementary tone”

How are you deciding which notes to play?

Is it a function that somehow depends on generations or position?

The soundtrack for Conway's Game of Life that I've always had in my head is John Carpenters' Wraith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21NIxhWQrIU

There was a cellular automata music sequencer once that I enjoyed. https://earslap.com/page/otomata.html

Needs flash or iOS. Simple mechanics but lots of fun music. Good design.

Super interesting. Is there a dedicated place where I can just play with Melody Breeder?

30 years later, I still miss double muffled dolphin cellular automata ambient synth... https://www.muffled.dk/map.php

Sounds lovely, I'd love to hear what it's like when the number of living cells on screen controls the length of the note so it's not just a constant rhythm, even though it is hypnotizing.

Reaktor vst has a drum synthesizer that generates midi patterns from a small grid that simulates Conway's Game of Life. It's pretty fun to play with.

interesting! a sort of digital windchimes.

do you expect that in a blind trial it could be distinguished from playing a statistically similar number of tones chosen randomly from the available cells?

Darn, I can't hear the music on iphone safari :(

is broken or down rather

so can we interact with it please?