I made other experiments with Cyclic Cellular Automata using other neighborhoods and rules, and this one is particular interesting:
using the Moore neighborhood (eight cells surrounding the central one: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW); if a cell is in state C and is surrounded by two or more cells in state C+1, then it will switch to state C+1 at the next generation
If the total number of states are well calibrated, the automata easily reach a “stable state” (no more state changes)
These are two demo videos I made. In the youtube video description of the first, there is also a link to the source code (in P5.js).
This is a minimalist composition inspired by Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” (1967).
It can be performed by two musicians playing the same instrument or two different instruments. The score is simply a bar in 6/8 with 12 sixteenth notes; the tempo should be between 60 and 75 beats per minute.
The measure is repeated continuously at the fixed tempo, but in chunks of increasing length. Initially, only the first note is repeated, then the first two notes, then the first three, and so on. During the performance, the lengths of the chunks played by the two players become different and this can generate interesting and mesmerizing polyrhythms.
The MusiFrog algorithm is a deterministic algorithm for generating a sequence of notes using a “frog” (no animals were harmed in the creation of this algorithm). In this variant the frog plays on a two dimensional MxN grid.
Pi (π) is the most famous irrational number; the circumference of a circle is given by its diameter (two times its ray) multiplied by Pi, but ….
Pi is irrational, this means that its decimal representation NEVER ENDS (there is no “last digit of Pi”) and NEVER REPEATS (never enters a permanently repeating pattern); so it’s also an elusive and mysterious number. Already the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians tried to calculate its value as precisely as possible, and currently we “know” the first 68.2 trillions of digits of Pi (record achieved on 14 August 2021 by Team DAViS of the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons).
Many artists have tried to use Pi as a source of inspiration, but …. but it is conjectured (we have no formal proof of it) digits of Pi are randomly uniformly distributed in the sense that the digits 0 through 9 appear equally often, as do pairs of digits, trios of digits, and so forth. So if you use a subsequence of decimal digits of Pi to (automatically) generate some “art” , then you should obtain the same result if you use a simple random number generator.
[This is the first post of a serie dedicated to some ideas of generative art (graphics and music)]
I’ve always been a fan of the videogame Nibbler and other snake-like videogames (I also “played” with them theoretically … but this is a total different story 😉 ). But can the concept be used for generative art? I had an idea and set up a quick sketch in which many colored snakes freely run around the screen, random food blocks are placed on the screen and whenever a snake eats a food its length increses, when a snake hits another snake or its own tail it tries to change direction … but the result was not so promising; this is an image of the sketch:
Then I tried using a simple line to draw the snake and use another set of rules:
The SNAKELINE DRAWINGS algorithm:
a set of “snakes” (drawn as lines) are randomly placed on the screen
each snake:
has a random color. The color is picked from a finite palette for better results.
can move horizontally/vertically/diagonally (for mor interesting results, some of them can move only horizontally/vertically)
has a preferred rotation angle (clockwise or counterclockwise)
when a snake moves its length increases
if a snake hits another snake or its own tail, it tries to rotate and
continue its run (or stops moving)
… and “magically” the results became more interesting:
A simulation of the brain activity of an electric sheep: it dynamically combines some of the best paintings ever created.
The memory evolves and the combinations are endless and unique. With a little bit of patience, weird artistic “anachronisms” can arise: an old japanese boat sailing in Venice, a sleeping hawaiian in front of Plato and Aristotle, a clock near the animals in a prehistoric cave …
The animation was exhibited at PDC@Coimbra 2021 a Processing Community Day initiative supported by the Processing Foundation with the goal of celebrating art, code and diversity while promoting creative coding and computational thinking as tools for creative students, researchers and professionals. The theme of the exhibition was “Anachronism”.
The soundscape is purely generative (made in VCV Rack).
Asemic Writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content”, or “without the smallest unit of meaning”. With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. …. Asemic writing is a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. …
Inspired by a challenge launched by Robert Boran on the Facebook group Creative Coding with Processing and P5.js I created a Processing sketch that simulates an Asemic Writing. The technique is based on a sequence of eight random “words” that alternates randomly; each “word” is a combination of “elliptic oscillators” that follows the rectlinear movement of the (hidden) pen on the page.
The animation is accompained by a simple purely generative soundscape made with VCV Rack and Native Instruments Absynth VST.
This is the final result.
As soon as I clean-up a little bit the code (actually a mess) I’ll publish it here and add more details.
In a previous post (see here) I talked about “The world’s ugliest music”, a composition made by Scott Rickard using some math techniques in order to minimize the repetitions and the predictability of the sequence of notes. I also made my personal interpretation of the piece using a synthesizer and VCV Rack.
Then I launched a “challenge” on the VCV Community site asking VCV users to give their own interpretation of the ugliest music in an “sci-fi alien context” starting from the MIDI file or a small VCV template with the sequence. Many users accepted the challenge and created very interesting patches (and accompaining videos) … surely if put together they well represent THE UGLIEST ALBUM: The Alien Ping.
Recently I saw a TEDx video by Scott Rickard about “The world’s ugliest music”; and I suggest you to watch it.
Usually good music is characterized by a balance between repetition and variation, applied to one or many of the components of the music itself: melody, texture, rhythm, form, and harmony. So what happens if we try to completely remove the repetitions?
In Scott’s music a math formula is used to generate all the 88 notes of a piano and their duration: starting from value 1, the next value is generated multiplying by 3 the previous one. If the value exceeds 88 then 89 is repeatedly subtracted until the value falls back in the 1-88 range:
1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 243–>154–>65, 195–>106–>17, … and so on
The duration of the notes are calculated using a Golomb ruler : each note is placed on the timeline in a special position (“mark”) in order to avoid any recognizable rythmic pattern. Indeed in a Golomb ruler the positions of the marks are such that all distances between them are distinct. The sequence of 88 note durations (expressed in 1/16th) used in the ugliest music is the following:
You can listen to the music played on piano in the last part of the TEDx video; the title of the piece is “Costas Golomb N.1: The Perfect Ping” … and it is quite ugly. But I like creating “bleeps and bloops” on a modular synthesizer (actually I’m using VCV-Rack and a semimodular Behringer Neutron), and sometimes the results are often not really melodic … so I tried to make a patch and play the ugliest music on it.
I also made a simple sketch in Processing 3 in which the 88×88 grid (notes are from left-to-right, top-to-bottom) are displayed and a “sonar ping” is generated when each note is played.
If you want to experiment yourself you can download:
A Processing 3 sketch of four slowly evolving polygons and a meditative soundscape created by a few Tibetan Singing Bowls.
The algorithm is very simple:
place each vertex of each polygon in a random position
assign to each vertex a random direction (all polygons have the same scalar velocity)
at every frame move each vertex, if the new position is outside a border, simply make it bounce (reverse the velocity component orthogonal to the border)
assign a different color to each polygon and draw only its outer border (no fill)
