Collaborative Composition with Creative Systems: Reflections on the First Musebot Ensemble

In this paper, we describe the musebot and the musebot ensemble, and our creation of the first implementations of these novel creative forms. We discuss the need of new opportunities for practitioners in the field of musical metacreation to explore collaborative methodologies in order to make meaningful creative and technical contributions in the field. With the release of the musebot specification, such opportunities are possible through an open-source, communitybased approach in which individual software agents are combined to create ensembles that produce a collective composition. We describe the creation of the first ensemble of autonomous musical agents created by the authors, and the questions and issues raised in its implementation.

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