Self-organised music

Abstract

Self-organisation, as manifest, for example, by swarms, flocks, herds and other collectives, is a powerful natural force, capable of generating large and sustained structures. Yet the individuals who participate in these social groups may not even be aware of the structures that they are creating. Almost certainly, these structures emerge through the application of simple, local interactions. Improvised music is an uncertain activity, characterised by a lack of top-down organisation and busy, local activity between improvisers. Emerging structures may only be perceivable at a (temporal) distance. The development of higher-level musical structure arises from interactions at lower levels, and we propose here that the self-organisation of social animals provides a very suggestive analogy. This paper builds a model of interactivity based on stigmergy, the process by which social insects communicate indirectly by environment modification. The improvisational element of our model arises from the dynamics of a particle swarm. A process called interpretation extracts musical parameters from the aural environment, and uses these parameters to place attractors in the environment of the swarm, after which stigmergy can take place. The particle positions are reinterpreted as parameterised audio events. This paper describes this model and two applications, Swarm Music and Swarm Granulator.

Linking Sonic Aesthetics with Mathematical Theories

“…For example, multi-agent systems that model flocking and swarming with simple rules can produce seemingly intelligent behaviour (think of a flock of birds where every bird suddenly changes to a new direction, apparently simultaneously). Indeed, swarming models have been used to mimic the interactions of freely improvising musicians (Blackwell and Bentley 2002;Blackwell and Young 2004;Unemi andBisig 2004, 2005;Davis and Rebelo 2005). Other multi-agent systems have simulated evolutionary processes to generate musical structures (Miranda and Biles 2007).…”

Ecosystemic methods for creative domains: Niche construction and boundary formation

“…The algorithm was adapted to a musical domain by Blackwell and Young, who draw an analogy between the self-organising behaviour of a swarm or flock and an improvising ensemble [15]. In other examples, a more abstract use is made of the principle of self-organising in multi-agent systems, such as the distributed drawing systems studied by Driessens and Verstappen [16], Eldridge and Dorin [17], McCormack [18], and Greenfield [19].…”

NN Music: Improvising with a ‘Living’ Computer

“…Lewis's term emotional transduction, defined as a "bi-directional transfer of intentionality through sound" [9], establishes the essential criterion that musical interaction should occur principally through the medium itself, rather than via control information. An alternative analogy, proposed by Blackwell and the author [4], is stigmergy, the process by which self-organising, structured behaviours of insect populations result from the interaction by individuals with their environment, not directly with each other. Musical performance, between players or players and machine can be regarded as similarly self-organising.…”

“…Decisions (or at least nonarbitrary changes in state) can be instigated by chaotic or complex systems: cellular automata, particle swarms [4] or neural networks [16]. These processes are not designled, and evidence self-organising properties that can modify the audio environment and necessitate response from both human and machine participants.…”

“…In the modular PQƒ architecture proposed for live algorithms [4], P is an analysis function, Q is a 2 Audio recordings are available at the author's website, www.myoungmusic.com synthesis function and ƒ is a hidden algorithm; any complex generative system, mapping function or AI learning mechanism (as in this case). P and Q interpret, and interface with the sonic environment, relaying parameters to and from the algorithm ƒ respectively; this is analogous to the processes of listening, playing and creative thinking practiced by a human performer.…”