VirtuaLatin - towards a musical multi-agent system

This project investigates the use of multi-agent systems for musical accompaniment. It details the construction and analysis of a percussive agent, able to add timbales accompaniment to pre-recorded salsa music. We propose, implement and test a novel representational structure directed towards Latin music, and develop a music listening system designed to build up these high level representations. We develop a generative system which uses expert knowledge and high level representations to manage a set of behaviours which combine and alter templates in a musically sensitive manner. Overall, we find that the agent is capable of creating accompaniment which is indistinguishable from human playing to the general public, and difficult for domain experts to identify.