Preface

A few summers ago, I attended a concert of the UK’s “emotive, cinematic break-beat trio” GoGo Penguin and I thought “I bet my musebots could do something like that”. Making some alterations to an existing system that produces ambient music, the musebots came up with this result: generative music for jazz trio with robotic drums and Disklavier.

Four tunes, performed by John Korsrud, trumpet & flugelhorn; Jon Bentley, tenor and soprano saxophones; and James Meger, bass and mechanical instruments. Most of the music is composed by musebots: the selective improvised portions should be evident.

System Description

GoGo Musebots is a co-creation between a generative system and its creator, as well as three improvising musicians. The system is routed in composition rather than improvisation, in that plans are created, then filled in by musical agents (musebots) by creating a score; musebots can edit their individual parts, making decisions based on global structures and local events by other musebots. The final score translated into MIDI information – to be performed by robotic instruments – and lead-sheet notation – to be performed by humans.

All titles are generated by algorithm, selecting word combinations from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable.