Swarm Lake: A Game of Swarm Intelligence, Human Interaction and Collaborative Music Composition

In this work we aim to combine a game platform with the concept of collaborative music synthesis. We use bioinspired intelligence for developing a world the Lake where multiple tribes of artificial, autonomous agents live within, having survival as their ultimate goal. The tribes exhibit primitive social swarm-based behavior and intelligence, which is used for taking actions that will potentially allow to dominate the game world. Tribes’ populations also demonstrate a number of physical properties that restrict their ability to act illimitably. Multiuser intervention is employed in parallel, affecting the automated decisions and the physical parameters of the tribes, thus infusing the gaming orientation of the application context. Finally, sound synthesis is achieved through a complex mapping scheme established between the events occurring in the Lake and the rhythmic, harmonic and dynamic-range parameters of an advanced, collaborative sound composition engine. This complex mapping scheme allows the production of interesting and complicated sonic patterns that follow the performance evolution in both objective and conceptual levels. The overall synthesis process is controlled by the conductor, a virtual entity that determines the synthesis evolution in a way that is very similar to directing an ensemble performance in real world.