Music Box is an artistic implementation of emergent behavior to create music. Music Box employs a flocking algorithm (Reynolds, 1999) to display animated notes that rise from a written score and move to create a flock-lead musical arrangement. The result is emergent sound; a musical composition directed by the visual representation of flocking. The experience is a pseudo-synesthetic application of visual rules to the creation of music.
The philosophical goal of this creative exploration is to experiment with freeing the musical score from the prevalent model of composer, performer and listener. Instead the experience is more democratic. Here, the composer suggests, the performer follows a few loose rules, and the listener plays with the composition. As a performance, it attempts to conflate listener and composer, in much the same way author and player are combined in sandbox game narratives. This is accomplished through the development of artificial intelligence software that applies the visual rules of flocking behaviors to the algorithmic arrangement of musical tones.
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