Andante: Composition and Performance with Mobile Musical Agents

Across the Centuries, musicians have always had interest in the latest scientific achievements and have used the latest technologies of their time to produce musical material. Since the mid-20th Century, the use of computing technology for music production and analysis has been increasingly common among music researchers and composers. Continuing this trend, more recently, the use of network technologies in the field of Computer Music turned out to be a natural research goal. Our group is investigating the use of mobile agent technology for the creation and performance of music within a distributed computing environment. We believe that this technology has the potential to foster new ways of composing, distributing, and performing music. This paper describes a prototype implementation of Andante, an open-source infrastructure for the construction of distributed applications for music composition and performance based on mobile musical agents. We also describe two sample applications built using this infrastructure.