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Song of Life

Updated: Under: projects Tags: #music #generativeMusic

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.

Screenshot of the app
Image 1: Screenshot of the 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.