Digital Sea

Digital Sea is an ambient generative music piece written in the Pure Data programming language. It is constantly changing, circulating, and flowing.

Cover art for Digital Sea by Marley Starlight: a pixelated image of fish underwater.

The program I wrote to record this piece is capable of generating a unique, endless performance on a computer by integrating randomness into the generative procedures.

A screenshot of a computer program written in the Pure Data language.

The basic setup of the program is that a musical chord progression is generated one chord at a time by randomly selecting a root note, whether the chord is major or minor, and then it is turned into a triad (three-note chord). The notes for the triad are sent to other instruments within the program that perform the chord in varying ways.

There are some instruments that don't respond to the chord, specifically the wave-like sounds. These sounds are generated with a noise source and a volume level that is modulated at a rate that is being periodically recalculated at random.

There are also some interactive sliders and buttons that affect the music. I left them unlabelled on purpose so the player could discover what they do on their own.

Download it!

You can download a recording of the piece on Internet Archive or Bandcamp. You can also download the code from the project repository on Codeberg if you want to try running the program yourself.