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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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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?

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.

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

is broken or down rather

so can we interact with it please?

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)