The Predators is an artificial life (ALife) instrument where predators and preys are left to interact in a neutral environment. The idea behind the instrument was to create a non-linear note or sample player; one that was controlled by the properties of an ALife system rather than random number generators.

The predators have properties like energy, speed, restlessness, friction and focus on a prey. They loose energy by not eating from the preys or by fighting about them. When a predator takes a bite of the prey, it emits a sound. The sound is either synthesized sound or samples from the buffer pool. The pitch of the sound is defined either by the vertical location of the prey or by assigning a special pitch to the prey by choosing a note from a keyboard that pops up. Of course, preys and predators can be added to or removed from the environment. The ALife properties of this instrument are rather simple. We could have added things like environmental obstacles, age, death, reproduction, etc. but we did not find that it would serve any musical purpose in this simple instrument.

There are various synths available from a popup menu, but most noteable are the scode synth where the user can live-code synths in realtime and the audiostream where you can stream in audio from any running bus and have the predators triggering those sounds.

Fixed Pitch/Relative Pitch means that each prey has a frequency that is either fixed (and you can define which frequency it has) or relative to it's vertical location.