Connor McGaffin – Looking Outwards 11

Seaquence is a musical social experiment from Grey Area Labs, created by Gabriel Dunne, Ryan Alexander, and Daniel Massey. The core interface of Seaquence is appropriately a sequencer, which users can compose short compositional loops with. These compositions are assigned to “organisms” which physically reflect the audio qualities of the music they emit, such as pitch, frequency, and the sostenuto of notes. These organisms congregate in the radius of a central point in their canvas-like “environment”. The more organisms in proximity to another, the more dynamic the music arrangement becomes.

As stated, the algorithms in this project takes proximity, timing, and “drunken walk” progressions into consideration. The nature of organism movement is reminiscent of the responsive “worm” lab from several weeks ago.

I am incredibly drawn to this project, and this Looking Outwards post took me forever to complete because I spent so much time playing with Seaquence.  I think I gravitate towards this piece because of its ability to create such elaborate compositions through such a simple interface. Its ease of use is incredible and empowering.

From these observations, I find it reasonable to assume that the collaborators on this project shared similarly aligning design sensibilities. There is an emphasis on minimalism to achieve complexity. This consideration of both micro and macro levels of interaction make an understanding of intuitive human interaction evident.

the project

grey area labs