ZOA

What it does

A MIDI sequencer built on Conway’s Game of Life. Cells drawn on the grid play as notes, and the rules of the game move the pattern as it runs, with auto advance mutating it each pass. Four playheads read the grid at once, each with its own pace, note length, semitone offset, step pattern and a rule for reading order such as up, down, random or walk. A root note, octave, scale and range constrain everything.

In the demo

Jade starts standalone, drawing cells to hear the onboard sound, then moves to AUM and copies Game of Life oscillator shapes from Wikipedia to watch them cycle. She builds up all four playheads, one as a bass at a lower offset, then routes each to its own instrument, a synth, an acoustic guitar, a double bass and a drum kit. She plays the root note from her keyboard while it runs.

Worth knowing

It sends MIDI only, so it needs instruments downstream, and GarageBand cannot host it directly; Jade gets there by bussing AUM into Inter-App Audio. There is no swing control.