Album composed by algorithmic swarms

Evan Merz’s album Black Allegheny was arranged by the behavior of many AI ‘agents’ functioning within a bit of Java-based software –

In Becoming, I directly borrow Cage’s gamut and graph concepts; however, the software assembles music using concepts from the AI subfield of swarm intelligence. I place a number of agents on the graph and, rather than dictating their motions from a top-down rule-based approach, the music grows in a bottom-up fashion based on local decisions made by each agent. Each agent has preferences that determine their movement around the graph. These values dictate how likely the agent is to move toward food, how likely the agent is to move toward the swarm, and how likely the performer is to avoid the predator.

More on the project can be found over at Evan’s blog. [via Create Digital Music]