One of the strong suits of Otomata, the browser-based web app of generative-sound ingenuity, is its social component. The app employs a Conway’s Game of Life grid as the basis for collision-based music making, and then lets users easily share with each other those select patterns of which they find themselves suitably proud — like a double helix (see screenshot at right), or one based on the classic Game of Life figuration termed a “glider,” or what an Otomata enthusiast called “a really long loop.”
But if ever a bottle were designed to let out genies, it would be the Internet, and thus audio produced in Otomata flourishes even beyond the well-intentioned cabinet of pattern curiosities that its developer, Batuhan Bozkurt, built into its coding. (An extensive interview with Bozkurt, who is based in Istanbul, Turkey, was published here yesterday: “When Cells Collide.”) Over at soundcloud.com, for example, a search for “otomata” lists a growing number of recordings that take Otomata’s end result as a starting point. One of the strongest is, true to the app, quite simple: it merely applies effects to the Otomata-generated sound, adding a layer of dubby echo, and thus removing some of the self-evident repetition inherent in the original. The track is credited to Terribaddie:
There is a grid, and it is blank, just 81 squares arranged in nine rows and as many columns. Click on any single square, and it lights up: a cell has been activated, and it begins moving upward, toward the top of the grid. When the cell hits the wall, it rebounds, emitting a pinging sound at the moment of collision. The cell then travels down until it hits the opposing wall, again rebounding and pinging at once. Click on two squares side by side horizontally, and watch the resulting cells travel in unison visually, though they are pitched apart. Click on enough of these squares, and the resulting cells will collide with each other, triggering sideways motion and ushering in a new level of sonic and geometric complexity.
Yet for all the potential chaos, for all the unpredictable interactions, the resulting sound is what could widely be described as musical: tuneful, percussive, internally coherent.
Grid, Unlocked: Video footage of Batuhan Bozkurt’s Otomata audio-game in action.
This is Otomata, the grid-based generative music system, or audio-game, or sound-toy, developed by Batuhan Bozkurt, who is based in Istanbul, Turkey. A little more than a month ago Bozkurt announced the free tool’s existence on his earslap.com website. The rules, as he describes them, are simple:
Each alive cell has 4 states: Up, right, down, left. at each cycle, the cells move themselves in the direction of their internal states. If any cell encounters a wall, it triggers a pitched sound whose frequency is determined by the xy position of collision, and the cell reverses its direction. If a cell encounters another cell on its way, it turns itself clockwise.
The resulting wave of Internet-fed curiosity proved just as unpredictable as the sonic outcomes inherent in his creation. The Otomota site received more than a million page views in a matter of days. As of this writing, the above YouTube clip of Otomata in action has had more than 175,000 views. Coverage popped up not only on digital-music sites like createdigitalmusic.com (where Peter Kirn highlights Otomata’s social component, in which users share the result of their experiments), but also consumer-tech site like engadget.com. As a measure of the extent to which Otomata has helped popularize generative sound, note that the comments at Engadget are relatively free of the sort of snarky nay-saying that has been the reader response there to posts about sound art (witness, for an unfortunate contrast, a recent Engadget post about Switzerland-based Zimoun).
Contacted via email, Bozkurt agreed to be interviewed, and what follows is that conversation, lightly edited. He talks about the software-development fine-tuning that yielded Otomata, the promise and precursors of generative art, and some of the unlikely sources of his inspiration, notably the “hang” (“hang drum”), the steel instrument from which he derived Otomata’s tuning and sounds.
Steel Wheel: The “hang” drum, from which Otomota’s sounds are derived
Inevitably, the discussion touches on John Conway’s Game of Life, the popular ur-application of cellular automata, in which simple rules yield complex patterning. Bozkurt is careful to distinguish between the shape-changing algorithms of Conway’s 1970 concoction, and the more straightforward collisions of his own creation.
Primordial Programming: An example of Conway’s Game of Life in action (via wikipedia.org)
The email format of the discussion proved fruitful, allowing us to pursue various tangents, and easily track back to the moment at which conversation diverged. We talked about how he utilizes generative tools in live performance, and about a possible aesthetic parallel between his programmed and composed musical output.
Excellent Birds: Though he didn’t note the Conway-esque figurations at the time, Bozkurt linked to this video of a flock of birds from his twitter.com/earslap account a few weeks after the debut of Otomata.
Bozkurt, who was born in Istanbul in 1983 and continues to live there, is especially eloquent about the way that the ever-changing nature of computer technology shapes his decision-making as an artist and as a software developer. In a manner of speaking, the chaotic realm of digital sound — as exemplified by diverging platforms such as Flash and HTML5, and browsers that have their own idiosyncratic standards — is itself a generative construct yielding unexpected delights.
Marc Weidenbaum: The rules that apply in this game, the way collisions alter the way sounds are triggered — were they the first set of rules that you experimented with, or did you develop them through trial and error?
Batuhan Bozkurt: I have experimented with cellular-automata systems a lot in the past. I always found them fascinating for a multitude of reasons, the most important one being that they included the most essential elements I tend to employ for creating generative art. They have clearly defined states, they use feedbacks (the system is fed back its previous state and generates a new state), they have well-defined rules, and as a result they have emergent behavior. I’ve been programming my own tools to make art for many years and I don’t always work with very simple systems. Working with cellular automata (CA) is like a recreational hobby for me. They are very simple to implement, use, and understand, yet they include almost all of the ingredients I care about.
So if we take my past interest in these types of systems into account, it is an evolutionary step for me. That said, the rules Otomata uses were derived without any type of experimentation whatsoever. The idea just popped into my mind just as I was drifting into sleep one day. Later I thought it wouldn’t work well, or it wouldn’t be interesting at all, but I implemented it anyways to see how it behaves. A few tweaks (not to the rules but to the way they generate sounds) and I liked the result. Actually this was the first time I experimented with such a system. I mean, all the CA systems I’ve worked with in the past relied on neighborhood rules (like in Conway’s Game of Life). Otomata is distinct in this sense (it only cares about collisions) and I’m not even sure if it can be classified as a CA system technically. Read More »
Two days ago, after spending many hours with nothing playing but an MP3 that consisted in large part of the mechanical sound of an old turntable making its rotation, I had the sense that I was still hearing the track, even though I was miles from the house, pushing a bright orange three-wheeled stroller in which dozed my eight-month-old. This was along Golden Gate Park, where people regularly park their cars with the apparent interest in having their passenger-side windows broken. The sidewalk there is littered daily with glass, which collects in these dry glistening pools. I had navigated just such a pool of reflective shards, and one of those shards had, it turned out, embedded itself in the rear left wheel of the stroller. With each rotation, there was a scratchy sound, which in time took on the metronomic significance of a beat. The beat sound, in turn, so to speak, brought the ear to bear on what happened the other 350 or so degrees of rotation, when the wheel regained its grip on the pockmarked sidewalk. The sound of that portion of the rotation was weathered down, in a sandpapery way. I reached for my phone, continued to push the stroller, and used the bright red Record button in the Soundcloud.com app to tape 20 seconds of this beat. (It’s an Android phone, but there’s also an iOS version of the app.) The result is as follows:
Some comments began to accumulate on the page where the track is posted for streaming and download, and then 24 hours later an email arrived from Thomas Park, who records prolifically under the name Mystified. He had commented the day prior on my track, which I had titled “Broken Glass in a Stroller Wheel,” and in the intervening hours he had taken my track and produced something new from it, which he titled “Stroller Groove”:
Just looking at the waveforms of the two recordings, it’s clear that only one of these has the inaccuracies inherent in natural-world sound (even if part of that so-called natural world is a mass-produced, human-powered vehicle). The Mystified remix starts with a brief loop selected from the original track, and slowly accrues a veneer of minimal techno. As such, it provides an echo of my walk, in some manner resembling the way that my walk had provided an echo of the turntable MP3 to which I had been listening earlier in the day.
Thicket app co-developer Morgan Packard currently lives in Denver, Colorado, and a local alternative weekly for which I do some writing, the Colorado Springs Independent, picked up my interview (“Being Decimal: The Anticipatory Pleasures of the Thicket App”) with him. The app is his co-creation with Joshue Ott. The new version has a different introduction and has been trimmed for a more general audience, and it includes some additional information about the local community he’s found in the area, having moved there from New York with his wife. Packard focuses on the Communikey Festival (communikey.us), to be held next month and at which Monolake, William Basinksi, and Radere (Carl Ritger), among others, many from Colorado, will be performing. Read the piece (“There’s a Thicket for That”) at csindy.com.
RjDj is an iOS app that takes the sounds around you, transforms them, and then plays them back to you. The process is referred to as “reactive,” because the transformations occur in real time — i.e., they react to your (sonic) environment, as well as, in some cases, to more common iPod/iPhone/iPad techniques like touching the screen and moving the device.
RjDj is an app, but to borrow a phrase, or two, from Walt Whitman — who taught us to sing the body electric — it contains multitudes, because RjDj contains within it a growing library of “scenes,” each of which reacts to the world in a different way. When you install RjDj on your iPhone, it comes with a few scenes. Then you explore the RjDj library and select new ones. And, if you get adventurous, you can design your own scenes.
The incredibly popular Inception app, released last week, is a descendant of RjDj — it’s essentially a bespoke edition of RjDj, tailored to the sounds and aesthetic of the brain-twisting summer flick; each “dream” in Inception is, essentially, what would be a “scene” in RjDj.
Given how many RjDj scenes there are out there, with more every day, I asked the crew that develops software — at the company Reality Jockey, based in London — to recommend their favorite RjDj scenes and Inception dreams:
Favourite RjDj Scene: Dimensions (by Kids on DSP). Why?: There is a part in it where the microphone input drives the synth — I like that. More Info:rjdj.me.
Favorite Inception Dream: Travelling Dream. Why?: Whatever you are traveling with becomes an instrument. The music is composed and designed for exactly that situation: travelling. There is so much to say about this piece of music you could write a book about it, but it just sounds simple and super, too, which is the reason why I won’t write a book about it. :-)
Favourite RjDj Scene: Eargasm (by Damian Stewart) Why?: Eargasm was the first RjDj scene I heard while beta-testing it as a user in 2008. It completely blew me away. I used to listen to it for hours at a time. The sensation Damian Stewart created, of reality musically glowing — almost revealing a secret inner beauty in everything — is really special and has certainly touched a lot of people. More Info:rjdj.me.
Favorite Inception Dream: Sleep Dream Why?: I like a lot of the dreams we worked on for Inception for different reasons, but the Sleep Dream is especially fascinating because of the pervasive ways people are using it. Many people are actually going to sleep with this dream on and using it as a way to induce dreams. It’s very abstract sonically — reality is twisted into a vast intricate texture where time is reversed. It’s extremely surreal. Its also incorporates music from the movie in a very interesting way, stretching it out into huge granular soundscapes.
Martin Roth, CTO:
Favourite RjDj Scene: Echolon (by Günter Geiger) Why?: This is one of my favourite RjDj scenes, not because it is some technical tour-de-force or an artistic masterpiece, but because it is so simple and yet so addicting. Echolon is a bundled scene in the RjDj player and has become the most popular scene of all time. The basic effect is one that echoes your surroundings around you, pitching everything up and down. You hear different versions of the echo in your left and right ears. Sounds in your environment are pitched, giving the impression of a musical world. Possibly the greatest reason for the success of Echolon is that it provides a very striking effect, but that it is also relatively easy to understand. Everyone knows what an echo is, but few people seem to have had the opportunity to hear themselves or their surroundings echoed on demand. So here’s to you Echolon, the little echobox that could! More Info:rjdj.me.
Favourite RjDj Scene: Aware (by Florian Waldner) Why?: It’s very relaxing listening to it in the office. You get a nice spherical soundscape and you are connected to the “outside” to a very high degree. More Info:rjdj.me.
Favourite RjDj Scene: Replay Atlantis (by Kids on DSP ft Kirsty Hawkshaw) Why?: Atlantis throws you into the deep sea and you feel surrounded by a nice bass, relaxing melody and mermaids. This scene was like the first scene that really puts you into a complete new world. Replay Atlantis has kind of a story within it; it is an adventure, an experience rather than “just music.” And it also sounds great when the real world around you does not give the music something to react on. More Info:rjdj.me.
Joe White, Reactive Music Producer:
Favourite RjDj Scene: Seduction Part III (by Shuga) Why?: I like the idea of actively performing with someone else’s music as you listen to it. Seduction Part III has this cool r&b groove where you can add cheeky drum fills, synth lines and whooshes. It’s great to learn the interaction of the synth; after a while, you can create own your expressive melodies. More Info:rjdj.me.
Florian Stege, Intern:
Favourite RjDj Scene: Nothing on We (by Chiddy Bang) Why?: I like the groove of this hip-hop track and the way you can manipulate the beat and play with the instruments. I also like the variety of the different parts of the track. It gives you the opportunity to create a really nice, perfect individualized backing track for your vocals. More Info:rjdj.me.
One of the strong suits of Otomata, the browser-based web app of generative-sound ingenuity, is its social component. The app employs a Conway’s Game of Life grid as the basis for collision-based music making, and then lets users easily share with each other those select patterns of which they find themselves suitably proud — like a double helix (see screenshot at right), or one based on the classic Game of Life figuration termed a “glider,” or what an Otomata enthusiast called “a really long loop.”
Batuhan Bozkurt: I have experimented with cellular-automata systems a lot in the past. I always found them fascinating for a multitude of reasons, the most important one being that they included the most essential elements I tend to employ for creating generative art. They have clearly defined states, they use feedbacks (the system is fed back its previous state and generates a new state), they have well-defined rules, and as a result they have emergent behavior. I’ve been programming my own tools to make art for many years and I don’t always work with very simple systems. Working with cellular automata (CA) is like a recreational hobby for me. They are very simple to implement, use, and understand, yet they include almost all of the ingredients I care about.
Thicket app co-developer Morgan Packard currently lives in Denver, Colorado, and a local alternative weekly for which I do some writing, the Colorado Springs Independent, picked up my interview (