This music was created with the Murmurator, a flocking simulation-driven software instrument created in collaboration with Eli Stine for use with multi-channel speaker configurations in a collaborative improvisation context. Building upon previous projects that use natural system models to distribute sound in space, the Murmurator focuses on the potentials of this paradigm for collaborative improvisation, allowing for performers to improvise both with each other and to adapt to performer-controllable levels of autonomy in the Murmurator. Further, the Murmurator’s facilitation of a dynamic relationship between musical materials and spatialization (for example, having the resonance parameter of a filter applied to a sound being dependent on its location in space or velocity) is foregrounded as a design paradigm.
The Murmurator has been performed at the 2018 New Interfaces for Musical Expression (Virginia Tech), 2018 CubeFest (Virginia Tech), and a paper written about it has been presented at the 2018 International Computer Music Conferences (Daegu, South Korea) and at the 2019 International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMusArt) (Leipzig, Germany).
