Better support for music and audio is still evolving (as well as lots of stability and compatibility improvements), but I have faith open-source coding tool Processing [site | on cdmu | on cdmo ] could yield wonderful new visual interfaces for music. Daniel Piker has the latest addition, inspired by a recent post here:

FizzyNumberMusicMaker at Open Processing, a site for sharing Processing sketches – warning, makes sound immediately!

Built on the Game of Life ideas from our friend wesen (of ruin & wesen), this project uses colored cells to trigger elaborate washes of piano sound. He writes:

If the cell’s state is not just simply on or off, but a number in a range then you get all sorts of interesting musical runs and trills. You can also clearly see the connection between the colours and the sound.

The headline sums up the experience of using it. Ah, I remember countless hours spent with a desktop Yamaha GM unit and my old Roland Sound Canvas SC-55. But even if the sound of a thousand attacking General MIDI pianos makes you hide under your desk, you ought to be able to see how a simple interface can yield lots of different results. I can’t wait to see what’s next. Previously:

Build Your Own Game of Life Sequencer in Processing: Video Featuring rwmidi

Since then, I’ve gotten to hang out with wesen in Berlin. Basically, rwmidi has a little ways to go. The biggest issue is how to schedule events. Processing is set up to base timing on framerate, which doesn’t work all that well for music applications, which require greater accuracy. There’s also the tantalizing possibility of figuring out a way to slave Processing sketches to MIDI clock – so you could have Ableton Live running, then pull up a Processing sketch, for instance. wesen is working on those problems, but if you’ve seen good solutions outside the (somewhat limited) Java APIs, let us know.

The fever for creating pulsing, organic sequencers from the cellular automaton Game of Life continues. Now, you can get your Game of Life on with the iPhone and iPod touch, transmitting event control via OpenSoundControl. (Despite publishing this on the music site, this could be great as an additional modulator for live visuals with OSC-supporting software like VDMX!)

The developer describes the app:

The application runs a simple cellular automaton on a grid of cells. The cells can be interacted with by touch and triggers of three different colors can be placed on the grid. The automaton can be set to five different rule-sets, from classic Game of Life to simple horizontal or vertical stepping. Triggers are fired by “alive” cells and send their state as OSC messages to a configurable host on the same Wi-Fi network. Cells and triggers can be randomized by shaking the device.

It’s available now on the App Store, US$.99.

SonicLife project page

Thanks, Dustin!

Previous Game of Life goodness (an incomplete list):
Build Your Own Game of Life Sequencer in Processing: Video Featuring rwmidi

Audio Damage Automaton is Here: Artificial Life-Driven, Stuttering Effects Plug-in

Game of Life as Max App

glitchDS: Free Cellular Automaton Music Sequencer

And, of course, there’s Lazyfish’s wonderful newschool Reaktor creation, which I hope to look at more soon.

Game Of Life Sequencer in Processing from wesen on Vimeo.

Coding-for-artists tool Processing is already popular for visuals, but MIDI and sound have been a serious blind spot. Speaking of our friend Wesen of Ruin & Wesen, he has solved that with a new library called rwmidi, which makes MIDI programming far easier and more stable. He’s also solved the lack of proper Java MIDI support on Mac with the free OSXMidiSPI. You can download both from his site, under “Software > JAVA”:

Ruin & Wesen support downloads

Wesen today shares a screencast showing how you can build a sequencer using rwmidi and the classic Game of Life. For the record, the Game of Life dates all the way back to 1970 and British mathematician John Horton Conway. I really need to do some digging to track just how many computer musicians have applied the Game of Life to musical applications, but suffice to say, they’ve been doing it for quite some time – partly because you don’t need any computing power to make it work. Most recently, we’ve seen in synth form in the wonderful Reaktor ensemble by Lazyfish, Newschool (featured in Reaktor and included with the package), and as a kind of meta-effect from Audio Damage called Automaton.

What’s great about the Game of Life is that it helps you break out of endlessly-looping sequencers. Once you get the basic hang of this code, though, you’re by no means limited to the Game of Life. You could easily create other variations – perhaps a sequencer based on the game Breakout or Tetris, for instance. And this is a great introduction to using the rwmidi library if you prefer to learn from videos. Wesen promises more such tutorials in the future.

Monome Life, indeed. What makes the Monome so wonderful is not so much that the hardware and software itself are open source — nice as that may be — but that they have become a platform for experimentation and personalization. Max/MSP, now freshly injected with life following its version-5 release, has a similar ethos. Here are a couple of the creations that have impressed me most recently: a hacked-together implementation of The Game of Life in Max and Monome, and an impressive DJ app, dj64.

This is Your Life

Bean (blog | twitter | flickr) clearly very much loves his Monome, as indicated by the slideshow above. I recently spotted an interesting creation on the CDMusic Flickr Pool — an implementation of the iconic Game of Life simulation/game — and asked him about it.

I made it mainly just because I figured it should be possible. It’s not terribly efficient, and occasionally stutters, but that feels like part of its charm. It is monome tailored, but would run stand-alone with a little tweaking.

I’ve got the cleaned up version posted on my page of monome-specific patches:

http://www.fourthirtyeight.com/monome/#maxlife

There are a number of downloads there, including that one, so Max users, have at them!