The “falling sand” genre of games provide a unique “sandbox” experience to players, encouraging curiosity and creativity. Players experiment with a variety of powdered elements which are subjected to a detailed physics system and may react chemically with each other upon collision. These games notably lack sound, likely due to the intense computation this would require. This led me to developing a system for sonifying one of the most feature-rich “falling sand” games, The Powder Toy.

I wanted my system to both enhance the emergent experience of playing a “falling sand” game and provide a unique interface for exploring granular sound. It uses stochastic frequency modulated granular synthesis to map a distribution of sound grains to each distribution of powdered elements, using a mixture of data-driven and manual mapping. To implement this sonification, I used my own luagran~ MaxMSP external which receives distribution data from a forked build of The Powder Toy. I created additional sonification algorithms for the vegetation and electronics systems in The Powder Toy using simpler techniques.