Conway's Game of Life - in HH2

[shawnb]

Algorithmic music has always intrigued me. I wanted to set Conway's Game of Life to music, and HH2 is the perfect platform to do that.



A ***NEW*** video of it in action:
https://youtu.be/J4iiX-V4NHA

I did not want to write one specific implementation, rather a shared template that can be used by myself & others to start to build other automatons. Thus, instead of doing this completely in arrays (which would be far more efficient) I created a 'smart' shape, LifeCell-v1.pat. This shape is propagated into a grid. The benefit of this is that anyone can alter LifeCell-v1 using standard HH tools, without digging into the SDK or even the scripting language.

My biggest heartache with this is that the generation process MUST be done with the audio engine off. Otherwise bad things happen.

An intro video showing how to generate the patch & a couple examples:
https://youtu.be/UKV7mFPx0S0

The actual patches, if you're interested in experimentation & enhancement. Life-v1.pat is the main patch. LifeCell-v1.pat is a subpatch invoked by Live-v1:
http://www.sensomusic.com/forums/upload ... ife-v1.zip

More on Conway's Game of Life here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Some stunning large-scale videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vgICfQawE

[shawnb]

A new video & screenshot added above, basically showing you how to use Life as a sequence generator.

With 5 channels of midi output set to different instruments, it's kind of a "band in a box"...

[nay-seven]

Very cool patch Shawnb !
will test it soon fore sure. The quality of the videos are a bit cheap, any chance for a higher resolution ?
( i would like to add it to our facebook page if you're agree)

[shawnb]

No problem sharing my humble vids. They are both HQ, but sometimes you have to tell YouTube to play HQ videos in HQ...

The newer video has much better sound quality.

The older video is better for explaining things, but you have to manually switch it to HQ & it has poor sound quality. YouTube even botched the thumbnails, squishing them... Don't know why.

I'm clearly pushing the limits, and things are OK until I run my freeware screen capture software in parallel...

[nay-seven]

ok, about resolution, it's a problem with my firefox ( only 360p is available..) works fine with chrome

[shawnb]

If you want me to make a different video, let me know. The sound anomalies bug me...

These patches place great demands on your system. As an FYI...
- With no audio, I have successfully produced up to 30x30 arrays that execute perfectly
- With audio, I have successfully produced up to 13x13 arrays that sound great, no pops

I'm learning that the screen capture software would make me reduce this a bit.

It's shocking how much better things got just by pushing the HH2 audio buffer up to its max.