A swarm environment for experimental performance and improvisation

Abstract

This paper describes Swarm Performance and Improvisation (Swarm-PI), a real-time computer environment for music improvisation that uses swarm algorithms to control sound synthesis and to mediate interactions with a human performer. Swarm models are artificial, multi-agent systems where the organized movements of large groups are the result of simple, local rules between individuals. Swarms typically exhibit self-organization and emergent behavior. In Swarm-PI, multiple acoustic descriptors from a live audio feed generate parameters for an independent swarm among multiple swarms in the same space, and each swarm is used to synthesize a stream of sound using granular sampling. This environment demonstrates the effectiveness of using swarms to model human interactions typical to group improvisation and to generate organized patterns of synthesized sound.