ABSTRACT

"A Musical Agent is an application that consists of a general-purpose music script handler that is flexible enough to support many different functions an artist might require for writing algorithmic compositions. A musical agent is part of a distributed application that communicates with other similar agents over a network to create an algorithmic musical performance.

Experimental musicians around the world can make use of musical agents to perform a musical composition, each agent contributing to the performance. The group's performance can be heard by any participating agent. Each agent can be considered as a member of a choir. Unlike a true choir, the agents can be distributed across a network of computers.

In the real world, air is the medium in which sound travels, the agents instead use network connections as their communication medium i.e. the network latency between agents is used to provide a measure of virtual distances over the Internet to recreate sound loss through a physical medium.

The agent application is written in Java and makes use of the multicast Internet protocol to communicate over the Internet. MIDI instruments provide the sound output which allows for the implementation of additional voices.

This report also researches different methods of creating algorithmic compositions."

I must acknowledge the following people who helped make my honours thesis a reality: Dr. Alan Dorin, Mr. Jon McCormack and Mr. Ian Kaminskyj.

Thesis submitted to the Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering Department of Monash University