Synthesizing Music with Logic Gate Networks

Ian Clester

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Small digital circuits consisting of basic logic gates (AND, XOR, etc.) are capable of generating surprisingly complex musical output. In this paper, I present physical and web-based interfaces for exploring the space of audio-generating logic gate networks and 'bending' such networks via touch (or mouse) gestures to interfere with their operation and change their output while they are running. This work follows in the vein of bytebeat practices, in which music is generated by short code snippets at the level of individual audio samples, but takes things further by relying on an even lower-level form of computation. In addition to presenting the system, I offer some preliminary analysis of why these logic gate networks tend to produce musical output.

Citation

Ian Clester. 2025. Synthesizing Music with Logic Gate Networks. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15698986 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@article{nime2025_91,
 abstract = {Small digital circuits consisting of basic logic gates (AND, XOR, etc.) are capable of generating surprisingly complex musical output. In this paper, I present physical and web-based interfaces for exploring the space of audio-generating logic gate networks and 'bending' such networks via touch (or mouse) gestures to interfere with their operation and change their output while they are running. This work follows in the vein of bytebeat practices, in which music is generated by short code snippets at the level of individual audio samples, but takes things further by relying on an even lower-level form of computation. In addition to presenting the system, I offer some preliminary analysis of why these logic gate networks tend to produce musical output.},
 address = {Canberra, Australia},
 articleno = {91},
 author = {Ian Clester},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15698986},
 editor = {Doga Cavdir and Florent Berthaut},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 numpages = {5},
 pages = {618--622},
 title = {Synthesizing Music with Logic Gate Networks},
 track = {Paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2025/nime2025_91.pdf},
 year = {2025}
}