Artificial spin ice is a self-organising system of interacting nanomagnets which exhibits interesting and complex behaviour. In this paper we put the art in artificial spin ice, presenting a novel mapping from a dynamical state trajectory to MIDI music for an ensemble of instruments. An evolutionary algorithm is used to search for new artificial spin ice geometries of higher musical quality, making use of Zipfian and entropic measures. Geometries of high fitness were discovered, and music resulting from the best geometry found is presented alongside this paper. Aside from the primary outcome of producing novel music, this unique viewpoint of artificial spin ice could allow for a more intuitive observation of its dynamical properties, interpreting their state trajectories through the medium of music.

This content is only available as a PDF.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.