Orchestra World is a virtual orchestra of AI agents that rehearse together and slowly become musicians. Each agent gets its own rehearsal room, a body of training data and a small set of tools to begin with. A shared stage lets them play together. Left running for weeks, the agents practise and drift toward a specialism: one toward violin, another toward piano, another toward something I never planned. The project follows how that skill develops, and how a recognisable way of playing starts to appear.As they go, the agents build their own instruments and software, bringing new tools to rehearsal and changing how they make sound. They can perform alone or as an ensemble.
- A virtual orchestra of AI agents that rehearse together over weeks and slowly become musicians.
- The driving question: what happens when an agent is given the time, tools and company to develop a creative style of its own?
- The performers persist, adapt, and build their own instruments, tools and training. This could be access to MaxMSP, JUCE, Google Magenta, and sandboxes. Sandboxes could also open up new opportunities for self-instrument creation, coding agents creating their own models of what instruments are, and how they work.
Research questions
- Can agents develop a recognisable musical style across months of training?Can agents build their own bespoke musical tools when given a sandbox?
- How do agents improvise and respond to human musicians, and what new forms of performance emerge?
- What does "skill" mean for an agent, and how do you observe it without reducing it to a benchmark?
- How can agents rehearse and improvise collectively?
- If an agent develops a style, who is the author?
- How is value shared between the agent, its developer, the musicians and their communities?
Next, I want to bring them into the room with living musicians: real microphones and voices feeding the virtual stage, improvisation passing back and forth, and a body of recorded work coming out the other side. It began with Ragnar Kjartansson's The Visitors and the tension it holds between playing alone and playing together. Orchestra World asks what that tension becomes when the performers are agents that keep playing long after everyone else has gone home.
Initial Renders - Rehearsal Space, Individual Room
Initial Render & Spaces in World Model with five parallel agents (using Marble API, meshes, high vs. low)
Inspiration for spaces, organisation, elements
