Coming Together: Composition by Negotiation by
Autonomous Multi-Agents
Arne Eigenfeldt Philippe Pasquier
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
Vancouver, Canada
arne_e@sfu.ca
School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Simon Fraser University
Surrey, Canada
pasquier@sfu.ca
ABSTRACT
Coming Together is a series of computational creative systems based upon the premise of composition by
negotiation – within a controlled musical environment, autonomous multi-agents attempt to converge their
data, resulting in a self-organised, dynamic, and musically meaningful performance.
All the Coming Together systems involve some aspect of a priori structure around which the negotiation
by the agents is centered. In the versions demonstrated, the structure presupposes several discrete
movements that together form a complete composition of a predetermined length. Characteristics of each
movement – density, time signature, tempo – are generated using a fuzzy-logic method of avoiding
similarity between succeeding movements.
Two versions of Coming Together are described, used in two different musical compositions. The first,
for the composition And One More, involves agents interacting in real-time, their output being sent via
MIDI to a mechanical percussion instrument. This version has nine different agents performing on eighteen
different percussion instruments, and includes a live percussionist whose performance is encoded and
considered an additional agent.
The second version, for the composition More Than Four, involves four agents, whose output is
eventually translated into musical notation using MaxScore1
, for performance by four instrumentalists.
Agent interaction is transcribed to disk prior to performance; at the onset of the performance, a curatorial
agent selects previous movements from the database, and chooses from those to create a musically unified
composition.
 1
 www.computermusicnotation.com
International Conference on Computational Creativity 2012 221