i love the repeating patterns the oscillators make, especially at 9:42, it would be cool to see a full song made using a lot of these patterns in combination like loops
Other ideas - - it feels like we're arbitrarily picking an axis when we define the "strings" and "higher" notes, when the game doesn't really care what direction your objects are moving... - so, maybe define the pitches that play based on the number of neighbors, e.g. if a cell has 0-1 neighbors it plays C - could also define the pitches by the "direction" of the neighbors used to create a newborn cell - could also define them recursively from the prior set of pitches that play, in an attempt to create cohesive melody lines - play a note when a cell dies, not just when one is born
Yeah, it feels like the variance we're seeing is coming more from the stripey pattern underneath rather than the actual shapes moving across it. Would be neat to see one based on the "speed" of movement, though I suppose that would be hard to measure,
@@recurvestickerdragonMaybe measure speed by how many generations a cell lives? You might have to play the simulation a fair amount ahead to find out though. At least depending on what you to with thay speed. Like, would it be a simple scale that goes up with each generation or a specific note based on how long the cell lives in the simulation that is played ahead? How would you deal with a cell with an infinitely slow speed due to staying alive 100% of the time? There's always a chance of something else hitting it or never hitting it.
it would also be cool if something about the pattern or the notes determined the rhythm. right now it just feels like chords playing after one another, so rhythm would make it more musical.
Can you PLEASE just make like. 3 hours of this or something I have insomnia and can never sleep I’m commenting this at 3AM I would fall asleep maybe within an hour with this thank you so so much for making this awesome video to begin with though!
You could try mapping 2d to a scale using the Hilbert curve. Cells next to each other will tend to be close on the scale, but you would get occasional jumps and interesting intervals
*5/4. It has 5 whole beats; a 5/8 would be more like lopsided 2 beats (one whole beat + one slightly longer beat), or a rushed 3 beats (2 whole beats + one half-beat). Although, you can kind of feel it as a 5/8, with the 1st and 3rd beats emphasized.
Man, that harmonic minor die hard is haunting, I love it! It does seem like the synth volume is clipping quite a bit though, so it sounds a bit harsh. I'd love to hear a cleaner version!
Why talk about this here? I never understand people who says private thing like this on RU-vid? Wtf is wrong with humanity? This is about square making music, not a book about private life of random people
@@SkhalSaying that music is somehow comforting in their situation is related to the video. Also, people do it to vent. Caring about privacy is only necessary when there are people that can use the private information to do harm which is (unusually) not the case on the internet.
@@Skhal It's a comment, a feeling or thought they had while watching the video & music can often create feelings within people - sometimes comforting ones and hey, it's always nice to get some words of comfort from strangers. When that happens, it actually shows the better part of humanity. That we can all unite together just to make someone we barely even know, but we know are struggling, feel a little better. And, who knows. maybe someone out there is struggling with something similar and happened to click on the video and feels the same way- It's also nice to know… that you're not alone.
i've been a life enthusiast for some time now and I think this is a brilliant idea. I want to try every pattern with this, please do make an interactive website from this !
03:19 *Wow,so he's actually playing off of their positions!* I thought it was going to be him putting imagery of 'Life' together in synch with the music. *So the 'Lifeforms' are essentially writing the music,without even realizing that's what they're doing.* Brilliant!!!
I’ve been fascinated by the patterns the Game of Life makes for some time and yet this is the first time I saw it being used in such an unmodified state to output a signal like this. Lots to think on.
this is really cool! The detailed visuals is what makes it for me: colored tiles, tile labeling, generation counter, live 'piano', clear labeling. It no doubt took a lot of effort to code or edit the beautiful displays but as a viewer I find they make the video much more enjoyable!
3 Blue 1 Brown did a video about using space filling curves to assign frequencies to visual data at different resolutions. I think that there's a really cool intersection of those ideas to be explored!
I remember seeing the rules on an unerased whiteboard at school, thinking it was about a prison or something, then looking into it later and being super fascinated about it.
This is amazing. Would love to get my hands on this and play with it a little. I think it would be cool to have a system in which cells that are not newborn continue to ring. This would create interesting drones in patterns that contain statics and moving objects.
This is so cool! If you revisit this, I think another fun way to lay out the grid would be a 12x12 with each row going up the circle of fifths and starting from the next note as you go up the column
These would turn out really good with diminished chords as well, and maybe some way to stop neighbouring notes from playing, perhaps by keeping the neighbour note that is more popular. Thanks for sharing!
Awesome idea to turn the game of life into music. It sounds very interesting. I think it can be improved by adding rules for tempo / duration perhaps. But I already like it how it is
I recently saw something called a spiroglyph. It's basically an image made on top of a spiral line. I saw something related to this in the explanation about power line image transmission. A man drew with a black pen on top of a line of string wrapped around a cylinder. Then he passed the end of the string through a tube and attached it to another cylinder. When he spun the empty cylinder, the string would wrap around it and with it the image that was previously on the first cylinder. If you took this string and stretched it out, it would look like a line full of black waves. Based on this, an image arranged in some pattern can be disarranged, copied, using some kind of sonification to form a kind of "sound line", and rearranged to its original pattern. Sonification makes one wonder if music has other aspects besides musicality, such as communication, even mathematical calculations. Things like this make us think that music has a vast potential for application.
I would so love to have the ability to play with this myself, or even having the source being able to play with different parameters. This would be so cool
Amazing! You should map rhythm next, simplest being a sustain with steady decay for the whole lifespan of the cell. You could also have a floor where a minimum lifespan yields a the shortest duration for a much sparser, less plodding texture (e.g. 3 generations = 16th note). The visuals would be overwhelming as binary on/off, but might be really cool with some fade in/fade out effects.
How about an alternative approach: instead of using Conway's Game of Life to act as an instrument that plays different sounds based on it's locality (space & time) of each iteration, how about having the application generate Cells in Conway's Game of Life based on reading an audio file either it being a wav, a midi, or even an mp3 type file. Then we can feed the game with a given piece of audio such as a song and see how it would look within the context of Conway's Game of Life. With something like this, the time it takes for each iteration to occur would depend on the tempo of intended audio segment. This would also be very interesting to see.
"Still Life" is the name for Kane Pixels' entities from the "Backrooms". People theorized the name is connected to the art medium, but this makes so much more sense. I wonder if he drew inspiration from Conway's game of life.
As with most computer generated music tools, this works well to inspire and he a creative starting point. But none of this sounds like music, that's where a human has to come in.
Most of this is not necessarily to make compositions, but to prove a point - that music in its purist form is a series of patterns, and we can use things like Conway's Game of Life to find unique patterns and apply them to our own understanding of music.
Everyone is talking about Loafer - for good reason, I was considering turning some of these into songs and that's the first one that caught my eye. But the true gem is Die Hard - around the midpoint when that upper line starts it cooks so hard. Clean up some of the bass clutter and that could be the best one here.
I wonder also how it would sound by also just keeping pressed notes that are pressed two generations in a row as an extra thinning strategy, that way we also could maybe get like long lasting chords or something and avoid every single note being always pressed at the same interval to vary the rythm
