1 Swarm Synth V

1.1 Concept

In version V the sound has two layers. The macro layer is a voice for every flock: each flock that forms in the swarm sings its own drone, shaped by that flock's position, order, size and shape. The micro layer comes from individual boids: every time two boids meet, a short note sounds. And the macro tunes the micro — while the swarm is scattered, the notes fall like free, irregular rain; as flocks align, the notes lock onto the harmonics of their flock's drone and become a chord. An optional third layer, the beat, can join them: a flock crossing an invisible grid strikes its own partials (2.4.5).

The guiding principle is logic first: every sound must be traceable to something the flock did. The test for any change is whether a listener with closed eyes could tell what the swarm is doing.

Swarm Synth V is both an instrument and a composition tool. As an instrument it will be played by the user; as a composition tool it is played by a score — a timed text file — and rendered to video. Live performance can be recorded as a score, which gives the composer better possibilities to create a new song.

1.1.1 From IV to V

In one sentence: IV was a work in which boids make sounds; V is a work in which emergence itself becomes music.

• From individual to flock. In IV each boid made sound, forty of them overwriting five oscillators. In V the flock sings — an emergent entity that exists in no single boid, measured, given an identity (born, merging, splitting) and a voice. Individuals remain, as the encounter notes.
• Relation, not motion. Sound comes from boids relating to each other: an encounter between two, a flock among many, a flock crossing space (the beat). Moving boids without rules — the starting state — are silent.
• Order is harmony. A flock's order becomes consonance: scattered is bell-like, aligned is the harmonic series, and the individual notes are tuned to their flock as it aligns. A flock forming sounds like separate voices finding one chord; even the beat strikes the flock's own partials.
• Logic first. IV's mappings were partly accidental (exact pixel matches, a precedence slip) — part of its rough charm. V puts a measuring layer between motion and sound, so every sound can be traced to what the swarm did; for visitors it becomes an instrument whose cause and effect can be learned.
• From improvisation to composition. IV was played live and vanished. V can also be written, repeated and refined: scores and takes reproduce a performance exactly, and the sound atlas builds knowledge of the instrument.

What carries over: IV's simple, retro visual language (now on white paper; IV's black remains as a theme) and its three sliders, starting from radii of 0, and the idea that lines in space sound when crossed — IV's sine strings return as V's beat grid. V doesn't leave IV behind; it follows IV's question further, from “can boids make sound?” to “can we hear what boids make together?”

Side by side, in detail: