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The Game of Life

Work In Progress

Conway’s Game of Life is a zero player game in which, a grid of cells have two possible states - alive or dead. The generative and ambient nature of the game inspired me to make my own version featuring generative, ambient sound. The game itself was programmed using JavaScript with the idea of being hosted on this website at some point. The DSP was integrated with RNBO - as Web Assembly is one of the supported export targets and allows for simple integration of complex digital signal processing.

On each refresh of the page, the game file sends a list of each live cells coordinates to the RNBO.json file. This list is then scaled and formatted to split into 16 segments of the display. The population of each segment controls the volume of one channel on a mixer (there are 16 channels total). The channels on the mixer are panned to correspond with their respective segment on the screen. Creating a stereo effect.

This creates random combinations and dynamics of each channel on the mixer. Each channel consists of a granular synth as well as a saw tooth wave. Both types of sound source are having their amplitude modulated with an LFO. And each LFO is set to a different rate - creating massive complexity within a relatively stagnant appearing sound.

On the output there are a number of different effects - all with their dry/wet being modulated by a similarly slow LFO to amplify the difference in sound over time.

Lorem Ipsum...

final files

rnbo patch overview

game.of.life.html - live cell coordinate list + population

Finally, there is a seperate synth which is controlled by the users cursor data. If the user is clicking - that triggers a gate to open on the synth. X position is mapped to sample position, Y position is mapped to the pitch/playback rate. X and Y is mapped to a filter.