Algorithmic Composition: csound is my friend
Here's my first experiment with csound: Conway's Game of Life made audible. This Processing applet creates the score. The essential mapping is this: if a cell is alive at a particular generation, it sounds a note; the cell's y-coordinate in the grid determines the note's pitch, and its x-coordinate determines the cutoff frequency of a lowpass filter on the note. All cells are sounded as a chord for each generation, and the generations are played in sequence.
The csound instrument itself is very simple: it just plays a sample, starting at an offset determined by the score. The sample contains sixteen notes in a pentatonic scale, so the offset effectively controls the pitch. (Download this sample in aiff format here.) Another parameters in the score controls the frequency cutoff of the low pass filter (created with the lowpass2 opcode). (download instrument and example score here)
Sound samples after the jump.
Below are some examples of the output that this setup generates. (I wanted to do some video to better show the mapping, but damned if I can figure out how to synch Processing's MovieMaker library with csound ...) All excerpts are around fifteen to twenty seconds; the label describes the type Life configurations that generated the sound.
lwss on lwss [7]
octogon II [8] p5 and tripole [7] p2
begins with random distribution, achieves equilibrium
p14 tumbler
two gliders heading in opposite directions