https://audio.dev/ -- @audiodevcon
ADC Bristol - 9th - 11th November
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The Agentic Symphony - Multi-Agent Collaboration for Emergent Musical Composition - Meera Sundar - ADCx India 2026
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Four autonomous agents walk into a recording studio. No human conductor, no predetermined score. Just simple rules and competing objectives. What emerges is music with dramatic arcs, thematic development, and surprising modulations that no agent individually planned. This is the Agentic Symphony.
This talk presents a multi-agent system where specialized agents for harmony, melody, rhythm, and texture work together to create compositions that exhibit emergent behaviors: unexpected modulations, call-and-response patterns, and dramatic arcs that no single agent explicitly planned.
Each agent operates independently with straightforward objectives. The harmonic agent generates chord progressions using weighted Markov chains of common patterns (I-IV-V, ii-V-I). The melodic agent creates and develops motifs over those harmonies, using chord tones and passing notes strategically. The rhythmic agent controls tempo and rhythmic patterns, while the textural agent manages dynamics and voice density to create intensity arcs. Through a shared musical state object, agents ""listen"" to each other's outputs and adapt their decisions accordingly.
The implementation uses Python with the `mido` library for MIDI generation and FluidSynth for audio synthesis. Agents progress from pure rule-based decision making to LLM-enhanced musical reasoning, demonstrating how large language models can inform creative choices within constrained musical contexts. Live demonstrations will show the system's evolution: from individual agents playing mechanical sequences, to emergent collaboration producing music with genuine dramatic structure.
This project addresses fundamental questions in multi-agent design: How should agents communicate through shared state? What happens when competing objectives create productive tension? How does memory enable coherence over time? Music provides an ideal testbed-collaboration quality is immediately audible, offering intuitive feedback on agent behavior. The insights translate directly to multi-agent systems in robotics, distributed computing, and collaborative AI across domains.
Slides: https://data.audio.dev/talks/ADCxIndia/2026/multi-agent-collaboration-for-emergent-musical-composition/slides.pdf
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Meera Sundar
Meera is a software engineer, musician and newly minted audio engineer
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Streamed & Edited by Digital Medium Ltd: https://online.digital-medium.co.uk
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Organized and produced by JUCE: https://juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADC team:
Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper
Prashant Mishra
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