Grow Together with the Miasma

Piece composed with a genetic algorithm for this Junto challenge about evolution.

Here's the web app I built to generate it. (Source.)

It is a fork of another project of mine, hacked up to 1) make a stack of five riffs with random choices from a 15-limit tonality diamond and play them twice 2) see how close any of the resulting dyads are to ratios in the 5-limit tonality diamond (which generally sounds more consonant) 3) cull the notes that aren't close "enough" 4) play the resulting stack of riffs twice 5) fill in the holes in the riffs with random choices from the 11-limit diamond. Then, it repeats 2-5 as many times as you like.

I never got it sound the way I hoped it would. The problem is a core of pitches that fit the 5-limit diamond gets established and very rarely gets displaced. So, every 12 bars a bunch of random notes shows up and mostly get bounced. Which is more or less how evolution works, but I hoped it would sound more exciting.

• play
• pause
• min volume
• max volume

posted by ignignokt (2 comments total)

I can hear the evolution in this- I’ve been struggling with trying to implement different tonality systems and I agree it’s tricky. Good Junto post and thanks for sharing the code!
posted by q*ben at 3:47 PM on February 17

Thank you! It's messy code. Let me know if you need any clarification.
posted by ignignokt at 9:03 AM on February 20