Real-time Musical Interaction between Musician and Multi-agent System

The application of emergent behavior of multi-agent system to musical creation, such as controlling parameters of sound synthesizer and composition, has attracted interest recently. Although human control or programmed operation works properly, it is very complicated and seems overly monotonic. One of the features of a multi-agent system, self-organization, is suitable for controlling parameters of synthesizer and generating compositional rules. Furthermore, the system has the possibility to generate unexpected sounds and musical pieces in ways that an experienced musician would never try to generate. In this paper, we report a research on a musical computer system, which generates synthesizer sounds and musical melodies by means of the multi-agent and interacts with human piano players in real-time. We show empirically that our interactive system plays attracting sounds. We also demonstrate that a human player feels that the interaction between the system and himself is very reliable.. 1. Inroduction The problem of techniques, deterministic algorithmic composition made by only strict rules which succeeded to traditional composition is that no possibilities that can generate unexpected besides wonderful results. One of the purpose for using computers in musical creation is to generate unexpected results that cannot be generated with traditional ways. Therefore stochastic composition techniques, using random values generated by computer as parameters of composition, has been widely used. L. Hiller and L. Isaacson composed a suite named "Illiac Suite " with very early computer "ILLIAC " using the famous stochastic technique Monte-Carlo [1], and I. Xenakis generated peculiar sound called "Sound Cloud " in his pieces by stochastic technique with computer[2]. C. Roads collected famous stochastic techniques and gave a detailed explanation of them in his book[3]