@DBG3D @t36s Okay, I found another nice excerpt, a bit more minimal than the above, but maybe also more clear to hear the approach described earlier. Just to explain once more, all the samples used are only one-shot single notes (produced by Simon Pyke/Freefarm). All melodies, chords, chord progressions, rhythm and the overall arrangement are fully generated (mostly but not exclusively) via cellular automata. The composition system also had other means to create/control, e.g. probabilistically trigger the recording of notes/events of selected tracks/channels for a few bars and then replay these phrases later, maybe using a different time scale, transpose, mirror and/or with different instruments... This proved to be highly effective (and musical) in terms of longer progressions and to create more interesting multilayered compositions/progressions. Some phrases were kept in a memory pool for up to 12 hours (the piece ran for 3 months)...

As you can hopefully tell, the visuals for that installation were audio-responsive (not really audio per se, but responding to the events of the composer). Likewise, if the visuals would become too agitated/intense, an event would be sent to the composer to quickly dial down/thin out the musical intensity (e.g. trigger tempo change, mute tracks, lower velocity etc.). This hybrid, coupled two-way feedback worked very well in practice and there were so many moments I wish I would have recordings of...

#GenerativeArt #GenerativeMusic #MusicComposition #CellularAutomata #AudioReactive #Installation #VictoriaAlbertMuseum #Video

@t36s 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 https://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):
https://soundcloud.com/toxi/va-forever-excerpt

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

#CellularAutomata #MusicTheory #Composition #GenerativeArt