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The sound related project I chose to research is Atlås: an “anti-game environment” that generates music by completing self-generated tasks. The “anti-game” means that the app will solve these tasks by itself, without any need for human input.
This app was created by Agoston Nagy, who wanted to question human cognition and “more broadly corporate driven automatisms and advanced listening practices” which have been ingrained in most people. Nagy created the app using primarily JavaScript (and p5js) and Pure Data to synthesize the sounds together. Learning that most of this digital environment was created using JavaScript – the same language which we are learning – was encouraging and exciting for me because it means that if I keep pushing myself, maybe I could create something as beautiful, seamless, and imaginative as Atlås.
Above: A video showing a demo of the Altas app: you can see how the music is created and the included animations which build the landscape.