In a manner of speaking, the chaotic realm of digital sound - as exemplified by diverging platforms such as Flash and HTML5, and browsers that have their own idiosyncratic standards - is itself a generative construct yielding unexpected delights. He talks about the software-development fine-tuning that yielded Otomata, the promise and precursors of generative art, and some of the unlikely sources of his inspiration, notably the “hang” (“hang drum”), the steel instrument from which he derived Otomata’s tuning and sounds.Įxcellent Birds: Though he didn’t note the Conway-esque figurations at the time, Bozkurt linked to this video of a flock of birds from his /earslap account a few weeks after the debut of Otomata.īozkurt, who was born in Istanbul in 1983 and continues to live there, is especially eloquent about the way that the ever-changing nature of computer technology shapes his decision-making as an artist and as a software developer. As a measure of the extent to which Otomata has helped popularize generative sound, note that the comments at Engadget are relatively free of the sort of snarky nay-saying that has been the reader response there to posts about sound art ( witness, for an unfortunate contrast, a recent Engadget post about Switzerland-based Zimoun).Ĭontacted via email, Bozkurt agreed to be interviewed, and what follows is that conversation, lightly edited. Coverage popped up not only on digital-music sites like (where Peter Kirn highlights Otomata’s social component, in which users share the result of their experiments), but also consumer-tech site like. As of this writing, the above YouTube clip of Otomata in action has had more than 175,000 views. The Otomota site received more than a million page views in a matter of days. The resulting wave of Internet-fed curiosity proved just as unpredictable as the sonic outcomes inherent in his creation. If a cell encounters another cell on its way, it turns itself clockwise. If any cell encounters a wall, it triggers a pitched sound whose frequency is determined by the xy position of collision, and the cell reverses its direction. at each cycle, the cells move themselves in the direction of their internal states. The rules, as he describes them, are simple: Each alive cell has 4 states: Up, right, down, left. A little more than a month ago Bozkurt announced the free tool’s existence on his website. This is Otomata, the grid-based generative music system, or audio-game, or sound-toy, developed by Batuhan Bozkurt, who is based in Istanbul, Turkey. Grid, Unlocked: Video footage of Batuhan Bozkurt’s Otomata audio-game in action.
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