Interaction and Self-organisation in a Society of Musical Agents

This paper outlines a distributed architecture defining a virtual world where musical agents interact according to the expression of mutual affinities. Agents continuously exchange information in their respective neighbourhoods while self-organization takes place. The society functions on a scale between total autonomy and a platform that accommodates compelling man-machine interactions, providing an adaptive musical playground. Agents associate spontaneously into temporary clusters, viewed as emergent structures. These clusters are considered the result of perpetual self-production following the theory of autopoiesis. The fluctuating associations are interpreted as complex polyphonic constructs in real-time.