Really Weird Idea

Has anyone heard of the game Conway's Life? It's that little annoying
program that comes with some operating systems and all it does is make
little blobs multiply on a square grid apparently randomly, but they're
always really working on some sort of rule. I was thinking, what if you let
them do that on a lattice? Take a 3-5 lattice, for instance, and set up a
game of Conway's Life on it, with different rules reminiscent of cadences,
where whenever a cell occupied a square that pitch would sound. Oscilators
would make pedals or rythmic patterns in the same meter as their period (a
period-3 oscilator would do something in 3/4 time), gliders would modulate
endlessly, and spacefillers would form gigantic, increasingly dissonant
tonal structures. The generations would tap out the beat. I'll set to work
on it straight away.

"The air was full of music. So full it seemed there was room for nothing
else. And so each particle of air seemed to have its own music , so that as
Richard moved his head he heard a new and different music, though the new
and different music fitted quite perfectly with the music that lay beside it
in the air.
"The modulations from one to another were perfectly
accomplished�astonishing leaps to distant keys made efforetlessly in the
mere shifting of the head. New themes, new strands of melody , all perfectly
and astoundingly proportioned , constantly involved themselves into the
continuing web. Huge slow waves of movement, faster dances that thrilled
through them, tiny scintillating scampers that danced on the dances, long
tangled tunes whose ends were so like their beginnings that they twisted
around upon themselves, turned inside out, upside down, and then rushed off
again on the back of yet anopthger dancing melody in a distant part of the
ship...
"He knew he had been listening to the music of life itself..."
� Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams

Stay Tuned,
Keenan P.