Abstract:

In the last decade, researchers in the area of distributed systems created the concept of mobile agents: active, autonomous objects capable of executing computation in a computer network, migrating from node to node. We propose the use of this new concept and related technology for the creation and performance of music within a distributed computing environment. In this paper, we introduce Andante, an open-source infrastructure for the construction of distributed applications for music composition and performance based on mobile musical agents. We describe a prototype implementation of this infrastructure based on Aglets, a Java mobile agent platform, as well as a sample application built on top of this infrastructure.