Presented at a panel on NKS and Music at the Wolfram Institute NKS 2007 Conference in Vermont, the software pictured above is a collaboration between John Kiehl, a record producer and computer programmer from MIT, and Maurice Methot, a composer and professor from Brown now at teaching at Emerson College in Boston.

Kiehl had already developed the shape and engine of the software just for the fun of it - a realtime graphical display of the 256 basic rules of 2D cellular automata (Wolfram, 2000) with various types of control over parameters with multiple points of access to the cellular automata data.

Methot then took this computational engine and interpreted it musically using the piano (right hand, left hand, piano roll, equal tempered chromatic scale, etc.) as the central metaphor and conceptual guide.

Used to control software synthesis / sequencing environments like Reason, the Kiehl / Methot NKS software produces an eternal "fountain of music" through which the infinite interest and sheer variety of 2D cellular automata is open to exploration and interpretation.

• On the "right hand", the first 127 cels of the automata grid are treated as triggers (on=note, off=silence) for notes which can be either passed or filtered by checking/unchecking the associated checkbox. The CA grid is then treated as a piano roll, reading low to high notes from right to left. The tuning is chromatic and equal tempered. The streams of note data (a new "chord" is the result of each successive generation of CA development) can be controlled in terms of speed from generation and in the"spread between" or arpeggiation of the resultant notes. Channels, durations, and velocities of notes can be controlled, as well as lowpass filter cutoff of a digital sampler loaded with a high quality velocity mapped grand piano. Unlimited presets of all parameters can be stored and retrieved on the fly.

• The "left hand" takes its data from state of the surrounding neighbors of the leftmost cel. This value produces one of eight possibilites on each generation, and is allowed the same controls as the "right hand" (velocity, transposition, filter, etc.) This more limited and repetitive scale-like data produces shorter tone patterns derived from data deeply embedded within the larger structures of the right hand.

• All of this is articulated by the behavior of the cellular automata and the interest found there. As the parameters of the musical interpretation can be altered/manipulated/stored/recalled, so too can the parameters of the 256 basic cellular rules themselves (rule, speed of generation, starting point, randomness).

• My goal is an open interpretation (a brazenly arbitrary one) that's still somehow "true" to the underlying structures of CA.

• The interpretation of cellular automata as musical data is not meant to imply an underlying "computational equivalence" between the math and the resulting sound, but rather to provide one interpretation among an infinity of others. Each piece is therefore a unique interpretation of data.

Maurice Methot, Assistant Professor
Visual and Media Arts
Emerson College