Virtual Agent - Human Agent Interaction
My software is often built around the concept of negotiation, in which virtual musical agents attempt to come to some understanding in terms of what they want to achieve musically, and how they try to get there. This can be translated into the notion of desires and intentions. In this particular work, the eight virtual agents have to deal with a live performer, who has his own desires and intentions, unknown to them. The agents must decide whether to try to follow the live performer, or continue with their own plans. To make things more complicated, each agent is given only a short “view” of the outside world (a quarter second, every two seconds) in order to form their individual beliefs of what the performer is doing. Since these beliefs will often be contradictory, the agents end up spending a lot of time arguing, resulting in the occasional indifference to the live performer.
Brian Nesselroad, percussion
The Indifference Engine (2013)
Paul Hession, drums
And One More (2012)
A realtime generative work for four percussionists, double bass, and Karmetic Notomoton - an 18-armed mechanical musical instrument. The live performer is considered part of the community of virtual agents that control the robot. During the last section, the system requests interactions with specific performers.
Coming Together: Notomoton (2010)
Coming Together: NotomotoN was inspired by the NotomotoN robotic instrument, created by Ajay Kapur. Given a composition’s overall duration, individual sections are calculated in which a rhythmic tala is interpreted by the agents, one of whom is the Notomoton, in unique ways. The human performer improvises over the dynamic environment, and his playing is interpreted by the agents in ways that affect the resulting music.
Members
Research papers
Eigenfeldt, A. "Generating Structure – Towards Large-scale Formal Generation" Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE’14) Conference, Raleigh, 2014.
Eigenfeldt, Arne, and Philippe Pasquier. "Creative Agents, Curatorial Agents, and Human-Agent Interaction in Coming Together." Proceedings of Sound and Music Computing, Copenhagen (2012): 181-186.