CELLULAR AUTOMATA MUSIC GENERATION

Rich French3/2/13

Advisor: Kristina Striegnitz

Game of Life

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

How is a CA music?

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”

Goal

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.

Cellular Automata

Life We need rules that are sparse yet complex Some rules include, Seeds (B2), AntiLife

(B0123478/S01234678), HighLife (B36/S23)

Excitable medium K states, if state is g, g either stays the same or Turns into g+1 state

Musical Features

Melody Scales Note placement Song structure Rhythm

Previous Work

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

The Representation

Layered CA system like CAMUS system The entire CA representation represents a

song Melody is represented by a Life

Automaton

The Representation

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

The Representation

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.

The Representation

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

Example Song

High Life (B36/S23)

Tools

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.

Evaluation

Results From Experiment

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

Conclusions/Future Work 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.