spores
A touchscreen instrument built on a simulated slime-mold colony. The performer tends the organism rather than playing notes; sound emerges as a byproduct of care. No food, no colonies, no sound.
01visuals
03design artifacts
What happens when a musical instrument can die? Not break — starve. Spores is a touchscreen instrument whose sound is conditional on the survival of a simulated slime-mold colony. The performer doesn't issue commands; they tend an ecosystem, and sound emerges as a byproduct of care.
approach
Most musical interfaces are direct: you press, the system responds. Spores is indirect by design. You don't address the synth — you address the colony, and the colony drives the synth through its biological state. The performer takes a caretaker role: distributing resources, creating disturbances, reading the organism rather than mastering an input-output map.
The interaction reduces to three gestures, each constructive or destructive within the ecological metaphor:
- Seed — spawn a colony. Its horizontal position sets pitch in a Dorian scale.
- Feed — deposit nutrients, by tap or drag, that diffuse until consumed. Feeding sustains health and continuous timbral motion.
- Disturb — a finger-wipe across the virtual petri dish that clears the local chemical field and fragments the colony, spiking stress.
The principle at the center is legible non-determinism: variability that arises from the system's own evolving response rather than injected randomness — behavior you can read even when you can't predict it.
process
Under the surface is a real-time agent-based model of Physarum polycephalum following Jones (2010): agents sense trails, deposit pheromone, and form territory through attraction and avoidance. The simulation runs in Python on a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen. Twelve ecological metrics — health, stress, growth, density, frontier — are extracted continuously; nine map to synthesis parameters over OSC, while each colony voices itself over its own MPE MIDI channel. Sound is generated in Ableton Live 12, driven by a Max for Live device.
The thesis piece is a seven-minute, six-section work — from colonies seeded without food, through contested territory, to a final bloom that crescendos as a dense field of nutrients is consumed.
Mini Spore extends the framework to an ESP32-S3: single-colony care at pocket scale, with a genetic-degradation mechanism that permanently diminishes the device each time a colony dies — making consequence structurally real rather than rhetorical.
context
- M.S. thesis, Music Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology. Advisor: Dr. Alexandria Smith.
- Premiered at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery, Atlanta.
- Tools: Python (agent-based model), OSC, MPE MIDI, Ableton Live 12 + Max for Live, ESP32-S3 (Mini Spore).
- Framework: Jones (2010) Physarum transport networks; Döbereiner on nonstandard synthesis; Puig de la Bellacasa's ethics of care.