Transcript Presentation Link

Rich French
3/2/13
Advisor: Kristina Striegnitz
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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
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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”
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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.
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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
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Melody
Scales
Note placement
Song structure
Rhythm
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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
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Layered CA system like CAMUS system
The entire CA representation represents a song
Melody is represented by a Life Automaton
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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
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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.
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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
High Life (B36/S23)
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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.
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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
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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.