Enabling Participants to Play Rhythmic Solos Within a Group via Auctions

The paper presents the interactive music system SoloJam, which allows a group of participants with little or no musical training to effectively play together in a “band-like” setting. It allows the participants to take turns playing solos made up of rhythmic pattern sequences. We specify the issue at hand for allowing such participation as being the requirement of decentralised coherent circulation of playing solos. This is to be realised by some form of intelligence within the devices used for participation. Here we take inspiration from the Economic Sciences, and propose this intelligence to take the form of making devices possessing the capability of evaluating their utility of playing the next solo, the capability of holding auctions, and of bidding within them. We show that holding auctions and bidding within them enables decentralisation of co-ordinating solo circulation, and a properly designed utility function enables coherence in the musical output. The approach helps achieve decentralised coherent circulation with artificial agents simulating human participants. The effectiveness of the approach is further supported when human users participate. As a result, the approach is shown to be effective at enabling participants with little or no musical training to play together in SoloJam.