A History Told in Grains

Kieran McAuliffe

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

The Powder Toy is a free, open source sandbox game. It features some of the most extensive systems out of all ‘falling sand’ games, a genre in which players freely tinker with powder substances and observe their chaotic interactions. These games notably lack sound. As an enthusiast of the genre, I took it upon myself to add audio to The Powder Toy. The result is not an objective or realistic solution to how these quirky games should sound, but rather an artistic exploration. Using this system, I present a history of the known universe told through grains of sand and grains of sound by three laptop performers.

Citation

Kieran McAuliffe. 2024. A History Told in Grains. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15027985

BibTeX Entry

@article{nime2024_music_9,
 abstract = {The Powder Toy is a free, open source sandbox game.  It features some of the most extensive systems out of all ‘falling sand’ games, a genre in which players freely tinker with powder substances and observe their chaotic interactions.  These games notably lack sound.  As an enthusiast of the genre, I took it upon myself to add audio to The Powder Toy.  The result is not an objective or realistic solution to how these quirky games should sound, but rather an artistic exploration.  Using this system, I present a history of the known universe told through grains of sand and grains of sound by three laptop performers.},
 address = {Utrecht, Netherlands},
 articleno = {9},
 author = {Kieran McAuliffe},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15027985},
 editor = {Laurel Smith Pardue and Palle Dahlstedt},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {September},
 numpages = {3},
 pages = {34--36},
 presentation-video = {},
 title = {A History Told in Grains},
 track = {Music},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2024/nime2024_music_9.pdf},
 year = {2024}
}