Ecology No. 1: Trees and Seeds

The title of this composition is "Ecology No. 1: Trees and Seeds". Sound. Score.

My fiancée Chelsea has quite rightly been on my case because I don't include much detail in these posts, so I'll write a few more words than usual on this latest work. One of the principles that guided me in its creation is complete organicism - that is, I wanted to specify a limited set of initial conditions, initialize an algorithm (or an "automaton", in the language of my software), and then simply let the automaton take its course without any other intervention. The behaviors of the two types of automata present in this composition remind me of trees (the green structures) and seeds (the red structures), so the title combines these personal associations with the organicism that I was trying to achieve.

So how, specifically, do these two classes of automata behave and interact with each other? Well, the trees usually hover around a fundamental frequency and venture quasi-randomly into the overtones of that frequency. When they "grow" to a certain overtone "height", the trees release seeds. These seeds then fall to a frequency approximately equal to the fundamental of their parent tree and then grow into new trees. The process repeats. Each tree may generate a more-or-less unlimited number of seeds and child trees. Some questions that I had to grapple with during the composition of Trees and Seeds include: How can this process be inhibited so that it does not result in runaway growth? How should a tree behave after it generates a seed so that it does not immediately generate ten more seeds and lead to a confusion of sound? How can I relate the sound of a seed to the sound of a tree? What kinds of initial conditions can I specify, and what are their effects? How can I create some sort of narrative through what is a more-or-less random process? I won't address these questions here, but they are representative of concerns inherent in algorithmic art.