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Cellular Automata Music Generation

Cellular Automata Music Generation. Rich French 3/2/13 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?.

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Cellular Automata Music Generation

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  1. Cellular Automata Music Generation Rich French 3/2/13 Advisor: Kristina Striegnitz

  2. 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

  3. 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”

  4. 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.

  5. 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

  6. Musical Features • Melody • Scales • Note placement • Song structure • Rhythm

  7. 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

  8. The Representation • Layered CA system like CAMUS system • The entire CA representation represents a song • Melody is represented by a Life Automaton

  9. 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

  10. 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.

  11. 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

  12. Example Song High Life (B36/S23)

  13. 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.

  14. Evaluation

  15. 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

  16. 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.

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