Abstract:

The Agent Design Toolkit is a software suite that we have developed for designing the behaviour of musical agents; software elements that automate some aspect of musical composition or performance. It is intended to be accessible to musicians who have no expertise in computer programming or algorithms. However, the machine learning algorithms that we use require the musician to engage with technical aspects of the agent design, and our research goal is to find ways to enable this process through understandable and intuitive concepts and interfaces, at the same time as developing effective agent algorithms.