NIME 2018

Interacting with Musebots
by Andrew R. Brown, Matthew Horrigan, Arne Eigenfeldt, Toby Gifford, Daniel Field & Jon McCormack

Musebots are autonomous musical agents that interact with other musebots to produce music. Inaugurated in 2015, musebots are now an established practice in the field of musical metacreation, which aims to automate aspects of creative practice. Originally musebot development focused on software-only ensembles of musical agents, coded by a community of developers. More recent experiments have explored humans interfacing with musebot ensembles in various ways: including through electronic interfaces in which parametric control of high-level musebot parameters are used; message-based interfaces which allow human users to communicate with musebots in their own language; and performance-as-interface and/or audio-as-interface, in which musebots have jammed with human musicians. Here we report on the recent developments of human interaction with musebot ensembles, and reflect on some of the implications of these developments for the design of metacreative music systems.