Dory: a purposively flawed and forgetful artificial musical agent

This paper presents Dory, a player-paradigm interactive music system for freely improvised music. While indebted to research in decentralised, agent-based musical systems and those employing Markov processes, Dory sets itself apart by capitalising on the artefacts introduced by suboptimal machine listening affordances and by speculating on the role of episodic and short-term memory in improvisation. Dory exhibits both reactive and learning traits, but is unable to exclusively commit to one or the other. By employing a subsumption architecture, unsophisticated machine listening techniques and probabilistic treatment of musical information, Dory appears as an engaging musical partner that displays seeming novelty and creativity, according to the author's preliminary qualitative evaluation. Keywords: Computational Creativity, Markov Chain, Subsumption Architecture, Musical Free Improvisation, Episodic Memory, Short-term Memory.