moishe/life-ambient

Life Ambient turns Conway's Game of Life, a well-known simulation where simple cells live, die, and multiply on a grid based on a few fixed rules, into a generator of ambient music. You place known Life patterns onto a 96 by 96 grid, and as those patterns grow and change over time, the living clusters of cells become sustained musical pad sounds. A cluster's pitch is set by how far it sits from the center of the grid, its stereo position is set by how far left or right it sits, and its warble comes from how much its shape changes as the simulation runs. When new cells are born, they trigger soft percussive ping sounds, while cells dying make no sound at all. This runs as a web application. After installing it and starting the development server, you open the page in a browser, click to enable audio, choose a starting pattern, and click on the grid to place it. You can rotate a pattern before placing it. There is also an arpeggio mode you can switch on, which changes how newly placed patterns behave: instead of becoming sustained pad sounds, they play as scrolling piano roll style arpeggios, where each row of the grid plays across a generation and the cell's position determines which musical note it plays. Under the hood, the project separates the simulation logic, the tracking of cluster identities and their properties, and the sound generation into distinct pieces, with a simple canvas based interface layered on top. It includes automated tests and a manual audio verification guide. This is aimed at developers and generative art or music hobbyists interested in experimenting with cellular automata as a source of musical composition, rather than a polished consumer app.