| Granular synthesis is great for this kind of stuff. Max/MSP, PD, and CSound have support for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_synthesis http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/SiggenGranular.html I made a "musical gas" cellular automata the worked that way, which could have LOTS of audio events happening each frame. Kind of like aerosol MIDI. It was based on a "Billiard Ball Automata" random brownian motion gas simulation, using the Margolus neighborhood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cellular_automaton#Neigh... It had stationary "microphone" particles whose x-position controlled the left/right stereo pan of the sound, and whose y-position controlled the speed (pitch) of the sound, and you could draw "bumpers" or "barriers" out of microphones to deflect and bottle up the gas particles in high or low pressure chambers. Both the microphones and gas particles had 4 bits of "payload" that would combine to select one of 16 voices (particle payload) and one of 16 samples of that voice (microphone payload). By the pitch and stereo pan, you could tell where the particles were hitting the microphones, and by the voice and sample, you could tell the value of the microphone and gas particle payloads. So of course I made "laughing gas" with a set of laugh samples, a "stinky gas" with a set of fart samples (to give the laughing gas something to laugh at), and a "scatting gas" (with samples like Cab Calloway singing), plus several other voices too (like Yes and No gasses for representing boolean values), so you could release just a few or any number or ratio of laughing/farting/scatting gas particles (finely tuning the fart:laugh:scat ratios to your mood). Just a few particles, and you'd only hear the occasional sound, but you could spray in a whole lot of any kind of particle to make a high pressure gas that sounded like a huge crowd of people laughing, farting, or scatting at once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZTuYLj5dbk Another thing that would work well with musical gas is diffusion limited aggregation, where instead of gas particle making a sound and bouncing when they hit a microphone, they make a sound and freeze into "ice" (another microphone). That way you have to keep adding more gas and growing the crystal bigger to make more sound (but you can use an "ice eraser" (hair dryer) drawing tool to melt frozen crystal back into sublimated gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_aggregation |