What Comes Up Must Come Down [disquiet0580] by Krakenkraft & Etherkraken published on 2023-02-11T19:46:20Z Disquiet Junto Project 0580: Evo Evol Evolve The Assignment: Record a piece of music that develops like an organism evolves. Out of curiosity, I had just bought a sequencer called ZOA, so I decided to go with the "Game of Life" approach of this sequencer (chances are I'm not alone in this). In case you're not familiar with the concept: Conway's Game of Life is a cellular model of evolution in which the life of each cell depends on the life of neighboring cells. In ZOA, each cell is a note and four sequencers play these notes according to additional rules. ZOA adds features like MIDI, and I liked that a lot. What I didn't like was the randomness of the melodies, but hey, isn't life random in the first place? (Big debate… let's say: Sometimes it feels random...) I had pushed the development by changing the probability of the notes by hand. If the game of life had come to a halt with some dead pattern, I would have used that, but I didn't want to force it. I played with many instruments and patterns, but in the end I reduced it to two tracks of eighth notes. For the beginning and the end I chose a cheap fade-in, fade-out, because life came quietly and very slowly out of nowhere, and I think that according to current scientific knowledge, one day it will end like that and just fade out. Self verdict: The track is soulless and meaningless, like the evolution of life, which need not mean that listeners could not hear either soul or meaning in it if they felt like it. -- ZOA (Mac/iOS) https://www.audiosymmetric.com/zoa.html I'm in no way affiliated with it and there are many alternative MIDI tools doing "life" patterns. ZOA is not without its limits, but I found it a very interesting addition to my pattern park. LIFE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life -- More on this 580th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Evo Evol Evolve (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that develops like an organism evolves), at: https://disquiet.com/0580/ Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0580-evo-evol-evolve/ Genre disquiet0580 Comment by IHauntGhosts very beautiful and peaceful track 2023-02-19T02:11:29Z Comment by hecuba rising the step sequencer approach was a good decision - i can imagine your song accompanying a documentary about the evolution of cellular life 2023-02-11T21:16:40Z