A Musical Petri Dish

ORIGINAL: ScienceSunday

Warning: you could spend way too much time on this site.

Seaquence
Seaquence is an experiment in musical composition. Adopting a biological metaphor, Seaquence allows you to create and combine musical lifeforms into dynamic compositions.

Go!
How to play The way each creatures looks and sounds is determined by the step-sequencer pattern, and other parameters you can tweak including their audio waveform, octave, scale, melody, envelope, and volume.

You can add multiple creatures to your dish by clicking the 'add' button at the top right of the screen. The combination of different creatures results in unique compositions that always change due to the creatures movement. You can click and drag on the world to move around your composition.

Compositions can be saved by clicking 'share', which can then be sent to others allowing them to hear what you've made. This demo video gives you a feel for how to create your own Seaquence composition:

Notes:
The 12 blocks under the sequencer represent the scale. Play with different combinations to modify the tonality of your melody.

• The + and - next to the scale represent the octave of the waveform.
• The waveform control points that modify the envelope can result in some very unique sound qualities.
• Click+Drag on the number underneath the waveform to change the waveform length.
• Mouse-wheel up and down on a creature to change its volume.

Seaquence is an original Gray Area Labs project created by Ryan Alexander, Gabriel Dunne, and Daniel Massey, with support from Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

Give us feedback
Twitter @seaquence
Email ping@seaquence.org