Music created by machines, and performed by machines
Moments (2016)
Moments is a generative installation that explores Moment-form, a term Stockhausen coined to describe his music that avoids directed narrative curves. Through the use of musebots – independent musical agents – that utilise a parameterBot to generate an overall template of “moments”, the agents communicate their intentions and coordinate conditions for collaborative machine composition.
This version of Moments is for two Disklavier pianos.
The work was premiered at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), in Brisbane Australia, July 2016.
MachineSongs (2015)
MachineSongs uses a Disklavier, the ModulatroN, a 35-mallet marimba-playing robot, and the Notomoton, an 18-armed percussion-playing robot, both designed and built by Ajay Kapur’s team at CalArts, all under the control of autonomous musebots. Using a machine analysis of a wide selection of music – including Mozart, Miles Davis, Pat Metheny, and 1940’s swing music – the software generates a short composition using what it has learned from the corpus, in terms of melody, harmony, and rhythm. However, the unusual orchestration and performance results in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek realisation.
Four week Installation at Hidden Pasts, Digital Futures SFU 50 Anniversary, Vancouver, Sept. 2015
Roboterstück (2012)
A tongue-in-cheek homage to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s famous total-serialist work Klavierstück XI, in which the performer glances at a sheet of music and randomly chooses to play from 15 notated fragments. In this case, virtual agents negotiate a texture – from 16 possible combinations – based upon the following features: slow/fast; sparse/dense; loud/soft; rhythmic/arhythmic. When the same texture has appeared three times, the performance is complete.
Roboterstück is presented as an ongoing installation, with the agents performing a new composition every 15 minutes, with each performance usually lasting between 3 and 5 minutes.
Unlike all of my other multi-agents works, Roboterstück makes no attempt at anything human-like, either in conception, or performance, by Ajay Kapur’s NotomotoN (an 18-armed robotic percussionist).
Performance from Deus Ex Machina II, Vancouver, May 2012
As an installation at the Musical Metacreation Weekend, Sydney, Australia, June 2013
As an installation at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), London, England, July 2014
In Equilibrio (2009)
Italian for “In Balance” – a live work for musical multi-agents. Responding to performance control over density, the first set of six agents interact to create an evolutionary rhythmic structure, communicating amongst themselves and altering their patterns in an effort to balance their own goals with those of the other agents. Rhythmic events are passed to a second set of six agents, which assign specific pitches: these decisions are mediated by their own desire to explore their environments (which are under performance control), while balancing the ensemble goal of harmonic stability.
arne eigenfeldt 