Inspired by the 2005 paper "Growing Music: Musical Interpretations of L-Systems" by Worth & Stepney, which explored whether Lindenmayer systems — originally created to model plant growth — could simultaneously produce both visually pleasing structures and musically coherent compositions. While L-system visualizers and generative music tools exist separately, very few interactive tools combine them into a single system where the same grammar drives both visual and audio output. This project bridges computational botany, formal language theory, and algorithmic composition.
Synthetica is an interactive L-System studio where you define formal grammar rules (an axiom string plus production rules), iterate them to generate increasingly complex strings, and then interpret those strings in two ways simultaneously:
F draw lines, +/- rotate the pen, and [/] enable branching via state saving.The magic happens when you discover grammars that produce both beautiful visuals and pleasing music at the same time — emergent art from pure formal rules.
F draws a line segment forward, +/- rotate the turtle, [ pushes the current position/angle to a stack, and ] pops it back (enabling branching structures).F plays a note; rotations shift pitch within a scale; branch depth affects octave. A configurable reverb tail adds spatial depth.S→replacement.