MusicSwarm: Biologically Inspired Intelligence for Music Composition

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Buehler, Markus J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Buehler, Markus J.
author_facet Buehler, Markus J.
contents We show that coherent, long-form musical composition can emerge from a decentralized swarm of identical, frozen foundation models that coordinate via stigmergic, peer-to-peer signals, without any weight updates. We compare a centralized multi-agent system with a global critic to a fully decentralized swarm in which bar-wise agents sense and deposit harmonic, rhythmic, and structural cues, adapt short-term memory, and reach consensus. Across symbolic, audio, and graph-theoretic analyses, the swarm yields superior quality while delivering greater diversity and structural variety and leads across creativity metrics. The dynamics contract toward a stable configuration of complementary roles, and self-similarity networks reveal a small-world architecture with efficient long-range connectivity and specialized bridging motifs, clarifying how local novelties consolidate into global musical form. By shifting specialization from parameter updates to interaction rules, shared memory, and dynamic consensus, MusicSwarm provides a compute- and data-efficient route to long-horizon creative structure that is immediately transferable beyond music to collaborative writing, design, and scientific discovery.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_11973
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MusicSwarm: Biologically Inspired Intelligence for Music Composition
Buehler, Markus J.
Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
Sound
We show that coherent, long-form musical composition can emerge from a decentralized swarm of identical, frozen foundation models that coordinate via stigmergic, peer-to-peer signals, without any weight updates. We compare a centralized multi-agent system with a global critic to a fully decentralized swarm in which bar-wise agents sense and deposit harmonic, rhythmic, and structural cues, adapt short-term memory, and reach consensus. Across symbolic, audio, and graph-theoretic analyses, the swarm yields superior quality while delivering greater diversity and structural variety and leads across creativity metrics. The dynamics contract toward a stable configuration of complementary roles, and self-similarity networks reveal a small-world architecture with efficient long-range connectivity and specialized bridging motifs, clarifying how local novelties consolidate into global musical form. By shifting specialization from parameter updates to interaction rules, shared memory, and dynamic consensus, MusicSwarm provides a compute- and data-efficient route to long-horizon creative structure that is immediately transferable beyond music to collaborative writing, design, and scientific discovery.
title MusicSwarm: Biologically Inspired Intelligence for Music Composition
topic Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11973