Distributed Musical Decision-making in an Ensemble of Musebots: Dramatic Changes and Endings Arne Eigenfeldt Oliver Bown Andrew R. Brown Toby Gifford School for the Art and Design Queensland Sensilab Contemporary Arts University of College of Art Monash University Simon Fraser University New South Wales Griffith University Melbourne, Australia Vancouver, Canada Sydney, Australia Brisbane, Australia
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract tion, while still allowing each musebot to employ different A musebot is defined as a piece of software that auton- algorithmic strategies. omously creates music and collaborates in real time This paper presents our initial research examining the with other musebots. The specification was released affordances of a multi-agent decision-making process, de- early in 2015, and several developers have contributed veloped in a collaboration between four coder-artists. The musebots to ensembles that have been presented in authors set out to explore strategies by which the musebot North America, Australia, and Europe. This paper de- ensemble could collectively make decisions about dramatic scribes a recent code jam between the authors that re- structure of the music, including planning of more or less sulted in four musebots co-creating a musical structure major changes, the biggest of which being when to end. that included negotiated dynamic changes and a negoti- This is in the context of an initial strategy to work with a ated ending. Outcomes reported here include a demon- stration of the protocol’s effectiveness across different distributed decision-making process where each author's programming environments, the establishment of a par- musebot agent makes music, and also contributes to the simonious set of parameters for effective musical inter- decision-making process.