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  • Writer's pictureThomas Ruiz

Cellular Automata Music Visualizer

I recently completed a music visualizer that uses Conway's Game of Life as its base within Unity. When conceptualizing the project, it quickly became apparent that due to the nature of cellular automata, that the playing field could become quickly overloaded with cells and that interesting dynamics are not guaranteed to occur. To work around this, I researched various shapes, systems, and oscillators that had already been discovered in Conway’s game of life that behaved in interesting ways. So instead of spawning in multiple single cells, in the visualizer, a shape will be randomly spawned in based on pre-set list cellular automata shapes. With this system, mesmerizing interactions are guaranteed, but the randomness of the simulation is still kept, as we cannot guarantee what shapes will spawn where.


My friend Kameron did the majority of the programming involved with getting the shader to display the cellular automata up and running, while I worked with other aspects of the scene. . His absolutely stellar worked guaranteed a very cool project! More work will be done on the project to increase it's complexities and create even cooler effects. Embedded is a video of our project reacting dynamically to different audio sources.



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