Music from Cellular Automata
The project involved exploring cellular automata as a way of procedurally generating music. By creating a cellular automaton in Max and developing an interesting mapping of the automaton's state to musical sounds, a piece of music can be created based on very simple starting rules. The "composer" of a piece would then input a series of starting states, from which the automaton would evolve on its own. I created a patch that allows the user to pick on of the 256 elementary cellular automata rules and evolved it, while mapping cells to notes to produce an interesting musical composition. The notefilter object, which I use to set up this mapping, can be used to map any number of instruments to any regions of the automata, while being able to select the specify the scale, timbre, and other parameters.
The Max patch can be downloaded here here.
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