Decentralizing Music, Its Performance, And Processing.
Axel Berndt · University of Michigan Library Repository · 2010
A musical piece is not one single entity.It is a collaboration of multiple simultaneously acting entities-its parts.Each one is subordinate to local and global compositional and performative structures.Based on this view of music we developed an agent-based music system approach, implemented in the MuSIG engine, which turned out to be a versatile and intuitive basis for a variety of tasks.Its capability to render expressive performances made it a valuable tool to investigate historically informed practices and for music production.Its ability to transition different performance styles seamlessly and in realtime, even with varying musical material, is most interesting for entertainment purposes such as game scoring.This paper reports of the MuSIG engine's architecture, development, and our experiences.It further describes how a core problem of musical nonlinearity, namely the generation of reasonable transitions, can be tackled through the decentralized approach.