In terms of interesting evolution I keep coming back to this one I just sort of randomly put together: http://www.earslap.com/projectslab/otomata?q=04046g043q515p3...
Have you listened to modern pop music??? :D
I do think the one linked in this post is a particularly nice one, and yeah the way it develops while maintaining a beat I think is fairly unusual.
This really shouldn't have the problem of repetition. You even make events in the game affect the music, to make it less monotone, and add to the mood of the game. It has been tried, but as far as I know no one has actually published something like this yet.
Q: Which scale is used in this? How did you come up with it? A: D A Bb C D E F A C are the pitches. I used the scale some models of Hang drums are tuned into.
Changing the scale could be a nice feature...
made this one by playing with the url itself. interesting format, each note is two characters describing X position and Y+direction it looks like so XYXYXYXY.
I built a table of the Y, the X are just 0 indexed numbers
^>v<
0 qwer
1 tyui
2 opas
3 dfgh
4 jklz
5 xcvb
6 nm01
7 2345
8 6789another interesting one visually and acoustically
an otherwise impossible to construct (i suspect) beat.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 ...
I had to investigate the primes
Primes less than 20
all up: http://earslap.com/projectslab/otomata/?q=1q2q4q6q1t3t7t
all right: http://earslap.com/projectslab/otomata/?q=1w2w4w6w1y3y7y
all left: http://earslap.com/projectslab/otomata/?q=1r2r4r6r1i3i7i
all primes up : http://earslap.com/projectslab/otomata/?q=1q2q4q6q1t3t7t0o4o...
all right : http://earslap.com/projectslab/otomata/?q=1w2w4w6w1y3y7y0p4p...
all down : http://earslap.com/projectslab/otomata/?q=1e2e4e6e1u3u7u0a4a...
So many ideas... there goes my Sunday afternoon...
http://earslap.com/projectslab/otomata/?q=0o1l2a3t584x6v72
to see what I mean
http://earslap.com/projectslab/otomata/?q=3z3o43503s
and some lame attempt at "chaos":
http://earslap.com/projectslab/otomata/?q=1h4o2n
(though of course these are just finite state machines and they all loop eventually)
I like this one because the two left-right components switch the period of the beat on the 5th and 9th rows (themselves also alternating pitch and period) while not breaking the base beat.
I do with the "make link" would let you 'bookmark' a phase: the way it started out went through some cool sequences before stabilizing into this.
I remember Native Instruments had a Game of Life-based drum pattern sequencer in one of their Reaktor packages.
Here's one I did that develops really nicely.
http://www.earslap.com/projectslab/otomata?q=062m4l6s8q2p610...
It would be really cool to be able to change the number of rows and columns and also the instruments and tones/chords for each row/column.
It's fun opening more than one browser tab and having more than one of these going at once. I refer you to my comment about needing to be able to change the instruments.