Song of Life is a piece of software I wrote to explore an idea I had: “What would Conway’s Game of Life sound like?”
At the time, I was experimenting with p5.js and wrote a simple Game of Life playfield. I turned this world into a sequencer, where the y-axis represents time, and the x-axis represents the musical scale.
After growing tired of just a single major scale, I decided to introduce some randomness and transform it into a web app.
You can play around with it online, songoflife.projects.ukr.lk.
Using a random number as a seed, the web app generates a unique world on load and associates it with a unique scale and key.
What I found more fascinating than the formation phase is the stabilization of the world, which sometimes yields a pleasing melody.