Grain of Life - granular effect based on Conway’s Game of Life

[tlvid]

Not connected to the dev but I bought this last night and think it's a brilliant concept. From the website:

Grain of Life is an audio effect plugin that fuses granular processing with Conway’s Game of Life. A cellular automaton runs in real time where every living cell triggers a grain of audio in the stereo field as the scan line passes through. Your textures evolve, mutate, and breathe without you touching a thing.

Draw cells directly on the grid or randomize to get started. Choose from three rule sets: classic Conway for evolving patterns, Coral for dense expanding textures, or Maze for intricate steady-state complexity. Shape your grains with controls for size, density, pitch intervals, reverse probability, filtering, and more.

https://dogmagic.net/grain-of-life/

[aMUSEd]

Great name

[El°HYM]

Life is a very simple game, unlike the one we're in. It only actually has a few rules, which I will now tell you. You divide up an area into squares. You won't see the squares on the demonstration I'm about to do. And a square can either be dead or alive. There's a live square. Here's another one. There's another one. There's another one there.

The rules are very simple. In the next generation, the next click of the clock, the squares are going to change statuses in some way or another. The square which has one or zero neighbors is going to die, a live square that has one or zero neighbors is going to die. A square which has two neighbors is going to survive. A square with three neighbors is going to give birth, is going to come alive, if it isn't already alive. A square with four or more neighbors is going to die of over crowding.

These are terribly simple rules and you would think it probably couldn't produce anything very interesting. Conway spent apparently about a year finessing these simple rules. They started out much more complicated than that. He found that those were all the rules you needed to produce something that appeared life-like.

- Eno's remarks

http://www.radicaleye.com/lifepage/enoexcerpt.html

[pekbro]

This is neat, but the sound didn’t do much for me, from what I could hear. Probably pass on it, since I am not actually required to own every granular plugin. Tho it seems that way sometimes.

Still impressive effort imo.

[Cuauhtli]

Yeah, not great sounding on its own. I guess it might depend on what sounds you use. Also sounds too busy/noisy. You could smooth it out with more processing, but with so many granular instruments and affects available that already do that... needs to be polished a bit more imo.

[GaryG]

Looks really neat but then I was a sucker for Audio Damages Automaton back in the day (now free I guess as legacy), not triggering sounds but different effects, stutters etc.