Emergent orchestra: a framework for bio-inspired musical robot swarms.

Can music emerge from a swarm of robots, each playing a single note and coordinating with the others? This project drives an exploration of music as a complex system, where rhythm, harmony, and structure arise from local interactions rather than centralized control. Drawing inspiration from musical ensembles and group synchronization, a bio-inspired framework is presented to reproduce a self-organized swarm of robots that behaves like a conductorless orchestra. Through minimal communication and distributed rules, the system reveals how musical patterns and collective creativity can emerge from simple, coordinated behaviors.

Pierluigi Tartabini is a Master’s student at Politecnico di Milano, currently conducting his thesis research at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour in Konstanz, under the supervision of Andreagiovanni Reina and Lluc Bono Rosselló.