Music with Unconventional Computing: A System for Physarum Polycephalum Sound Synthesis

Abstract

Abstract. The field of computer music is evolving in tandem with advances in computer science. Our research is interested in how the developing field of unconventional computation may provide new pathways for music and music technologies. In this paper we present the development of a system for harnessing the biological computing substrate Physarum Polycephalum for sonification. Physarum Polycephalum is a large single cell with a myriad of diploid nuclei, which moves like a giant amoeba in its pursuit for food. The organism is amorphous, and although without a brain or any serving centre of control, can respond to the environmental conditions that surround it.

Basic Transitions of Physarum Polycephalum

“…The fifth section presents the reaction of Physarum to music and sounds of different frequencies. As was already presented in [17] there is a correlation between motion of plasmodium and the music or sound frequency. Last section describes the experiments performed using Physarum as a bio-robot, able to transport microparticles whithin its own body, as in [18].…”

Creative DNA computing: splicing systems for music composition

“…An example of biological computing system openly accessible is the Physarum polycephalum, used in several works (Adamatzky 2010). As a consequence, many music projects using such type of biological system have been proposed, such as the Physarum polycephalum step sequencer (Miranda 2014) and a sonification work (Braund and Miranda 2013).…”

“…In this work, we focus on the challenge of reproducing the musical abilities of humans, by using bio-inspired computational methods. Among such methods there are Cellular Automata, e.g., (Adamatzky 2010;Miranda 1993Miranda , 1995Xenakis 1992), Evolutionary Algorithms, e.g., (Biles 1994;Jeong et al 2017;Liu and Ting 2015;Miranda and Biles 2007;Prisco et al 2020), and various DNA computing approaches, e.g., (Adleman 1994;Braund and Miranda 2013;Miranda 2014;Miranda et al 2009).…”

A modified Physarum-inspired model for the user equilibrium traffic assignment problem

“…The convergence of Physarum finding the shortest path has been proved by Bonifaci et al [32]. Based on its foragingbehavior, so far, the Physarum has been used to solve many problems, such as finding the shortest path in directed or undirected network [33,34,35,36], designing and simulating transport network [37,38,39,40], natural implementation of spatial logic [41,42], and computer music [43,44,45]. In addition, the Physarum model can also find the shortest path under uncertain environment [46,47] in the real application [48].…”