For the development of the next segment of my musical composition, centered on conflict and war, I’ve decided to create a variation of the famous Game of Life by Conway, adapted for the piano.
The Game of Life
Conway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It unfolds on a grid where each cell can be either alive or dead, according to very simple rules: a live cell with two or three live neighbors survives, while in all other cases it dies—either from loneliness or overcrowding. Moreover, a dead cell comes to life only if it has exactly three live neighbors.
Despite the simplicity of its rules, the game generates complex and surprising behaviors, including stable structures, oscillators, and "spaceships" that move across the grid. It has thus become a well-known example of how intricate global phenomena can emerge from basic local rules. But how can all this be translated into musical notes?
Endless Cycles
I began with the simplest possible form: two adjacent notes—let's say C and D—that could be either active or inactive. Since there were only two, each could have just one neighboring note, which could also be active or not. Then I created a simple program using AI—or Collective Intelligence (CI), as I prefer to call it. Naturally, I wasn’t focused on sound quality at this stage, so I used the roughest sounds available, planning to play the sequences on real musical instruments during the recording phase. Here’s the result (rotate or scroll on mobile to view the full content):
You can experiment yourself by clicking on the squares labeled with note names and then pressing start. For a full-screen view, here is the direct link:
After just a few attempts, I realized that every configuration eventually settled into a periodically stable pattern.
So, I extended the structure to twelve notes, also introducing the possibility for a note to have two active neighbors.
Even in this more complex version, it soon became clear to me that any initial configuration was doomed either to vanish after a short time or to become trapped in a perpetual cycle of death and rebirth—infinitely repeating itself, like a kind of musical samsara.
Driven by the desire to set the notes free and lead them to nirvana, I expanded the web of possible interactions and distributed them across two planes: the black notes and the white notes. In this new system, each note could have anywhere from zero to four active neighbors.
In this context—and for reasons tied to my personal musical symbology, which I will explain later—the notes F and B were neither black nor white. Therefore, I excluded them from the project.
Mechanics and Fate
At this point, I fully realized I had gone down the wrong path: I had fallen into the trap set by the very name Conway gave to his cellular automaton—for in truth, this “Game of Life” lacks two essential traits of life itself: fate and freedom.
Even animal life cannot escape its destiny—utterly unpredictable and unknowable, whether shaped by chance or by the design of some higher being. On top of that, human life seems to be endowed with free will, a force that seeks to shape and transform that destiny. Yet this interplay between fate and freedom is entirely absent in the life of these cellular automata, where notes survive and reproduce in a fully predetermined way, without freedom and without purpose, beyond mechanically obeying an algorithm. It is, in essence, a game of mechanical life—a contradiction in terms.
I had built a mathematical world from which to extract music, rather than transferring my vision of the world into music through mathematics. I had created a mechanical game instead of turning the notes into a symbol—into an allegory.
To free the notes from their rigid determinism, I would have had to introduce even more complexity, more layers, more variables. At that point, I could have simply translated Conway’s game directly onto a grid of notes—an exercise in futility, which I therefore carried out nonetheless:
But this is the game of clouds—chaotic forms, driven by such a multitude of variables and parameters that their exact shape and position become impossible to determine. It is still mechanical life, albeit at a higher level of complexity.
What interested me, however, was human life. And that is what I began to explore from that moment on—and what I will write about in the coming days.
To listen to and learn about the first two parts of my composition, you can watch the related videos on YouTube:
01 - The game of music: winning or playing?
02 – The Game of Music: I created a palindromic composition
Or listen to it directly on Spotify: