Musical Game of Life

Inspired by Vihart manipulating music as if it were space and time in her Folding Space time video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkmPDOq2WfA), I wondered what it would be like if the music 'tape' going through the box could rewrite itself each rotation - cellular automation!

So, adapting patrickfuller's Game Of Life implementation (from which this project is forked) and adding in a bit of my MIDI music work from an earlier project, I made this procedural, evolving, abstract musical thing that renders the Game of Life state as a sequence of MIDI notes, making for some oddly musical and sometimes disjointed sounds.

................................
.......................O........
.....................O.O........
............O.......O.O.........
...........OO......O..O.........
OO........OO....OO..O.O.........
OO.......OOO....OO...O.O........
..........OO....OO.....O........
...........OO...................
............O...................
................................

Rendering this like the music box:

time →
pitch ↓ (from low to high)

When it reaches the right hand column, it iterates the state (under Game of Life rules) 
and plays the new state, from left to right:

................................
......................O.........
.....................O.O........
...........OO.......O.OO........
..........O.O......OO.OO........
OO.......O......OOO.O.OO........
OO.......O..O..O..O..O.O........
.........O......OO....O.........
..........O.O...................
...........OO...................
................................

Notes

conway.py:

You will have to adjust the MIDI output (line 11) until you get music notes. If using a USB MIDI device, you'll probably see an LED flashing to show traffic going through it.

There are example scripts to help you tinker with the outputs:

• glider_pusher.py
• germ.py
• infinite_growth.py

The musical scale it can map to are set at the beginning of the conway.py file but you can always add in your own. Scales start at zero and each integer increase is a semitone up. For example, the C Major scale (C,D,E,F,G,A,B) is [0,2,4,5,7,9,11].

...
play_state(state, scale = [0,2,4,5,7,9,11], ...)
...

Drawing the initial state should also be easy to work out from these examples too!

Requirements

As this relies on pygame's midi interface, you'll need that set up. On linux, it's just a case of getting pygame installed.

Key libraries:

• libportmidi0
• pygame