Autonomous Virtual Instruments

This is a short documentation excerpt from a work in progress.

The work is a generative music and realtime animation project realized in Max with Modalys from IRCAM and the Zsa.Descriptors from Mikhail Malt and Emmanuel Jourdan.

With this project I am investigating two ideas. One is to use a physics engine/physics based animation to control physical modelling sound synthesis. The other is explore how audio feature extraction can be used as the means by which the autonomous agents interact with their environment.

These gong like instruments play themselves, with all the dimensions and forces passing from the physics engine to the sound synthesis. They also listen to each other and what they hear influences their behaviour. The model for their behaviour is quite simple, and the effect is perhaps not much different from a stochastic process.

Future work includes a more sophisticated listening and behaviour model and different kinds of instruments based around other kinds of physical models in the sound synthesis such as strings or tubes.