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Posted by hudsongr 9/11/2025

Conway's Game of Life, but musical(www.hudsong.dev)
209 points | 35 commentspage 2
nutate 9/11/2025|
gonna have a panic attack at the twinkle twinkle "star" not being a half-note.
recursive 9/12/2025|
Beethoven "5" similarly affected.
WhitneyLand 9/11/2025||
Very cool Hudson.

“each cell birth plays a harmonic note and each death plays a complementary tone”

How are you deciding which notes to play?

Is it a function that somehow depends on generations or position?

hudsongr 9/11/2025|
Yes it's based on the position. The column determines the note and the row determines the octave.
tetris11 9/12/2025||
The soundtrack for Conway's Game of Life that I've always had in my head is John Carpenters' Wraith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21NIxhWQrIU

renewiltord 9/11/2025||
There was a cellular automata music sequencer once that I enjoyed. https://earslap.com/page/otomata.html

Needs flash or iOS. Simple mechanics but lots of fun music. Good design.

jMyles 9/11/2025||
Super interesting. Is there a dedicated place where I can just play with Melody Breeder?
anjel 9/11/2025||
30 years later, I still miss double muffled dolphin cellular automata ambient synth... https://www.muffled.dk/map.php
rbongers 9/12/2025|
All of this guy's software and music seems so cool, and there's so little information on it. Can you share anything else?
anjel 9/14/2025||
Its been broken for 30 years, and yet its everlasting.
rbongers 9/11/2025||
Sounds lovely, I'd love to hear what it's like when the number of living cells on screen controls the length of the note so it's not just a constant rhythm, even though it is hypnotizing.
gbertasius 9/11/2025||
Reaktor vst has a drum synthesizer that generates midi patterns from a small grid that simulates Conway's Game of Life. It's pretty fun to play with.
testaccount28 9/12/2025||
interesting! a sort of digital windchimes.

do you expect that in a blind trial it could be distinguished from playing a statistically similar number of tones chosen randomly from the available cells?

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