JAZZ musicians who enjoy freeform improvisation may soon be using computer software to accompany themselves. A team at University College London has written a program that mimics insect swarming to “fly around” the sequence of notes the musician is playing and improvise a related tune of its own.
The Swarmusic program is the creation of computer scientists Tim Blackwell and Peter Bentley, who study how natural processes can be modelled in software. The pair believe that improvised music is self-organising in the way swarms of insects and flocks of birds are.
Their software works by treating music as a type…
