This piece unites Cage’s conception of graph music with ideas from the field of swarm intelligence. The software uses a graph of notated musical fragments to generate a score in real-time, for live performance. It does this by allowing a swarm of virtual insects to crawl over the graph, choosing new fragments with each move.

Earlier this year, we looked at how to read and write wav files in C++ and VB.Net, and C/C++ is really the natural choice for this kind of file IO (for a number of reasons that we won’t go into here). Nonetheless, not everyone uses C or C++ for computer music software. Increasingly, [...]