Logics for Dynamics of Information and Preferences

Even though there is presumably a lot of direct communication going on in a performance situation (through facial expressions, bodily cues, the signals of a conductor, if any, etc.), there will inevitably be situations where the coordination of the musicians rests on an (often tacit) agreement on “what to do next”. This agreement is in some cases only imagined (and hence the coordination happens by chance), in other cases the result of the musicians synchronously having the same expectations of what the other musicians will do, and in yet other cases the result of certain strategies being common knowledge (or a close approximation thereof) in the ensemble. This paper1 will be an introduction to how one can model the role played by the reasoning of the individual musicians in achieving coordination of the entire group (more specifically, solving coordination problems). I move from a very simplifiedmodel in terms of a classic multi-agent system over a sketch of an analysis in terms of Michael Bacharach’s use of “variable frames” in game theory tomy present, very preliminary attempts of applying decision theory and theories of belief revision to the description. (The latter twomay become important if we wish to describe how a composition or another set of rules for the performance can be moderated during the performance.)