Doug is a character based on Conways Game Of Life . Doug genrates a celluar pattern from an initial state and uses this to create music. Doug is modeled on a Biological algorithm and uses this to navigate life, Being a "biological algorithm" requires Doug to a sleep for 8 hours a day, which makes it difficult for him to actually be used. Ella the artist spends quite a lot of the time trying to wake him up.
Biological algorithms also produce other side effects, doug could die, requiring a doug volume 2, or a doug volume 3 and so on.
The gaps in Dougs processing reflects the way we deal with the world, after an 8 hour sleep Doug carries on with what he was doing before in a very linear pattern. Although we can be get so angry about a situation,causing humans to go on to the streets to riot our basic biological programing eventually kicks in requiring us to sleep, in the morning the anger returns.
As dougs cells evolve they trigger behaviours that change the composition. Each cell is given and attribute which is triggered when the cell is activated.
The cells act as individuals adding their influence to the composition. The cells have a variety of different roles.
The cells have two different roles providing memes which the music utilises, or to provide feed back on the memes changing them slighty producing a composition of constant flow of evolving textures.
When doug stops evolving, or loops his state , doug dies ,and the music stops. One of the main set backs modelling something biologically is that they are always doomed to died.
Doug can produce a confused mass of screaming voices or a choir of angels singing in the praise of syncro-no-city, the cells role are to create trends and copy, no matter how beautiful or ugly they may be. Dougs purpose is just to produce constant change, to add to the noise . What his cells copy is irrelevant to them, they are only interested in following the latest meme and improvising on it. monkey see monkey do.
Doug doesn't see the point of this, endlessly producing stuff just to produce stuff. He is tired and depressed about his situation, all he wants to do is sleep, at least he gets a break from being worked to death. The start of doug is the end of doug. Even death isn't an escape. A new doug is resurrected different from the last, but by still using the same algorithms, is doomed to repeat the same mistakes of the previous Doug. like Escher's never ending stairs Doug is forever working his way out of a looped maze . Doug is very aware of this, thats another problem using biologically modelled programs, developing the illusion of free will leads to depression,
heres doug doing his thing
heres doug doing his thing
Doug's audio engine consists of the following specification.
Doug use 6 fm synthesisers, and eight channels of feedback.
the fm synths have a variety of sounds , the sounds can be bought up in volume and stereo effects applied. Also the sound can pass through a variety of audio effects
They produce patterns by having a bag of notes that are disturbed in a controled random manner with a random percentage of spaces and a random quantise applied.
a controlled random octave, at which the notes play, and a controlled random number of sequenced steps controls how the riff meme is developed. The audio engine's tempo can also be controlled by doug. The synthesiser can be started and stopped also with conrolled random conditions.
These notes then can be modulated by a chord appreciator, using a variety of chords.
Each one of the six synths can be applied a pattern which can be unique or be a varient/same as one of the others.
The synth sounds are then effected by the feed back engine. The feed back engine is a granular synthesiser. An audio buffer, (which can or may not be related to the bpm, causing dissonance) , is split up into an equal number of pieces and the individual pieces, played back in order, can have a behaviour applied to them, as it's an audio sample its pitch can be changed, it can be turned backwards,have volume or stereo effects applied to it, repeated, passed through effects units ,or the order can be randomised .
The resulting effect is that which ever "meme" is being operated on a new variant is produced.
There are also controls to halt the changing of controls.
There are also controls to halt the changing of controls.
each cell can control one or more of these variables, the community really gets involved.
Examples of Dougs compositions can be found here
Examples of Dougs compositions can be found here