Emily Zhou – Looking Outwards – 04

On the subject of sound and computation, I recently downloaded an iOS app called Seaquence that composes music using petri dish of life forms.

The app by Okaynokay uses a custom physics engine to develop the lifeforms. The creatures’ tempo and waveform are represented by their antennae and tail respectively. I admire the game developers’ visualizing of sound in such a unique way; relating them to living organisms.

The interface allows you to adjust scale, octave, and rhythm and apply transposition and delay for each life form. Before playing the game, I assumed that the UI would be extremely complicated and it would be difficult to produce pleasant sounds. The fact that I was wrong makes me respect the effort put into finding a large range of sounds that work together and applying different parameters to each.

Sample music produced using Seaquence by Okaynokay, 2017.

Creators Gabriel Dunne and Ryan Alexander combined their acoustic and visual artistic sensibilities to develop an algorithm that intricately weaves together the parameters for sound.