The League Of The Synthetic Musicians.

THE OPERA OF FUTILITY

Overall Intention Of Work
The League Of Synthetic Musicians is an on going project in which I working toward creating a working orchestra of synthetic musicians that just spend their days sitting around and improvising music and sound and singing to each other to express their emotional turmoil and the (artificial) human condition as they try to make sense of their existence.

Working toward blending and examining aspects and relations between cognitive science, interactive music systems, artificial intelligence and synthetic character design as well as a pure scenography (no distinction between characters and set), theatre, mythology and the fine arts, the musicians will exist as part protgonists and part stage design (as installation). Not only will the musicians be influenced in what they play and sing by the music they hear from each other, but also by the world they exist in, their own strange bodies and the (software based) cognitive, emotional systems and contemplation and flow of thoughts about their situation and the world they exist in.

In a sense this work is aiming create a modern opera which is a mix of improvised music, improvised singing and theatre / installation / stage design. But to run continually until the musicians die or get switched off.

But stage by stage ... there is soooooo much work to develop with this. So much software and a very complex architecture of software. As well as the need to create other media content and worlds that not only they exist in, but are fundimental parts of their selves.

So I am breaking it into a series of projects and stages as I develop different aspects of the work. At the moment I am creating the systems of interacting music agents that are able to improvise music with each.

Previously
Several years ago I was researching and developing projects that were looking at how several computers could improvise music with each other.

This work was called Interactive Sonic Agents. ((((-ISA-)))).

I have still carried on working with this, developing more software componants and researching and conceiving of better ways of how it could be made to work and for the systems to hopefully be able to generate really good music when they improvise their musical sessions.

Even though I intend to use several computers, it is not essential. One computer can be used as the overall technique for the system is based around using several networked "Intelligent Music Agents" that interact with eachother to generate the music and sound. Several of these can either run on the same computer, or they can each run on their own individual computer. However, running on individual computers helps to communicate and create a sense of individual intelligent.music automatons improvising and jamming with each other.

New Agent Architecture

I am working on developing the new architecture for an agent. Each musical agents architecture is an extention of a PERCEPTION->THINK->ACTION architecture, and the componants of each is improved and extended. The architecture has / is being extended to include

1. reactive systems - an immediate responce to other agents music to how it generates its own
2. reflective systems - responces are mediated by the THINK componants
3. memory and pattern recognition at local and macro levels of music
4. predictive capacities - it guesses what the music of others is going to do
5. improved set of listening capabiliities and easy extention and configuration of these
6. new sets of generatorsand the easy extention and configuration fo these
7. new THINK componants, rules and heuristics, and easy extention and configuration of these
8. the inclusion of Digital Audio Generation and Digital Audio Listeners

Toward Synthetic Musicians
This research and development is actually part of an on going project in which to develop synthetic musicians. This will involve the extention of the agents capacities and architectures to include componants from Cognitive Science And Affect and Synthetic Character Design. These componants are to work together to create a complete synthetic nervous system, in which each musician also has Drives, Motivations, Emotion Systems (functional), Affective Perception and abilities to express emotional states and there intentions.