Swarm Intelligence for Generative Music

Sound Agents is an art installation relating real space and virtual sound space. It follows previous work on virtual agents and autonomous characters in 3D immersive spaces. However in Sound Agents, each virtual entity will not be a visual character but an invisible sound agent producing music, which will have its own autonomous behavior. Therefore the ambient music is dynamically spatialized in the actual installation space (through several loudspeakers (24 loudspeakers + 1 subwoofer) and modified by the movement of the virtual agents, providing thus an ever-changing music soundscape. Each sound agent is autonomous and his behavior will be described by simple local rules, in the tradition of Artificial Life and Self-Organizing Systems. Therefore we are interested in multi-agent simulation of Complex Systems who exhibit some emergent behavior, in particular what has been called swarm intelligence, such as ant foraging, or termite nest construction.