Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Cellular Automata And Music: A New Representation, Richard French

Honors Theses

For millenia, we’ve thought of musical composition as a purely human activity. However, we once also thought of an activity like chess to be purely human, but Deep Blue was able to defeat Kasparov in 1995 all the same. Could there perhaps be some tool or algorithm for musical composition that can replicate to some extent what human beings can do with music? This project explores this idea through the use of a tool called a cellular automaton. A cellular automaton is a grid space with a finite number of states for each of the ”cells” or ”squares” where a …