AEAEA: Playing a Physics-Driven Musical Ecology — by Christos Michalakos

augmented instrument drum game audio game engine Improvisation Live electronics Max procedural audio

AEAEA is a physics-driven audiovisual ecology that can be played with an augmented drum-kit or a gamepad. Acoustic gestures shape movement, light, density, collision, and growth during performance. The standalone version places the player inside the world through an avatar. Autonomous agents, rules, and sound processes shape both forms.

➡️ This installation is part of IRCAM Forum Workshops Hors-les-Murs Tokyo 2026

Two Ways into the Same World

Like Proteus (2013) and Panoramical (2015), AEAEA offers a world with rules but no prescribed objective, held together by the behaviour of an audiovisual system. It exists simultaneously as a live performance and as a standalone game, with both forms built around the same continuous environment. In performance, sensors and microphones capture the drum-kit while Max analyses the playing in real time. In the standalone game, the player navigates and interacts with the world through an avatar controlled by a gamepad.

From Earlier Game-Pieces

AEAEA consolidates more than a decade of musical game-pieces, each exploring a different relationship between improvisation, rules, and virtual space.

Pathfinder (2016) turned improvised drumming into a means of traversal through a projected world. ICARUS (2020) introduced chapters, explicit rules, and the possibility of failure. SPLT/SCRN (2023) made those rules social, setting a drummer and violinist against one another in a series of duelling mini-games. AETHRAKHTHON (2025) abandoned competition in favour of a physics-driven ecology whose balance the performer had to sustain. AEAEA brings traversal, rules, failure, and ecology together within a single continuous environment.

A Persistent Ecology

The world is populated by autonomous agents governed by processes including collision, flocking, growth, decay, and dispersal. A gesture may create an agent or alter one that already exists, but its effect always depends on the current state of the world. The same gesture might introduce a new population, transform an existing one, or produce no immediate visible change. Once created, agents continue to act without further input. They collide, reproduce, disperse, become trapped, or die whether or not the player intervenes. During each session, the world carries the accumulated consequences of everything played into it, even as individual traces change or disappear.

Sound as System Behaviour

The simulation sends discrete events and continuously varying state data to the audio system. Collision events produce attacks whose spectral and temporal profiles are determined by the properties of the interacting bodies. Growth controls sustained resonant processes over the lifetime of a structure. Flocking, dispersal, mutation, and entrapment provide control data for distinct synthesis processes. Agent distribution, density, and activity shape the electronic sound throughout the session. The accumulated state of the game determines its temporal form.

The Drum-Kit as Controller

In performance, Max analyses each stroke according to qualities such as intensity, brightness, and rhythmic density. These measurements are sent into the game, where their effects depend on the world’s current condition. The kit retains its acoustic sound and existing technique while being extended through live electronics. The audience hears the drums in the room alongside the sounding world they are driving. Rather than triggering a fixed audiovisual response, each gesture enters a system that continues to develop after the moment of impact. In the standalone game, movement and interaction through an avatar replace the drum-kit as the means of intervention. Beyond that point of entry, the same agents, processes, and sonic behaviours remain in place.

Play

Improvising within AEAEA is a matter of judgment as much as technique. An intervention cannot be undone, and its effects may become apparent only much later. A population created by one gesture, for example, might eventually encounter another established several minutes earlier. Fast, forceful playing can fill the environment rapidly and push it beyond what it can sustain. Restraint keeps the world legible, but may also allow its activity to diminish. The skill lies in deciding when to intervene, when to wait, and when the system has moved beyond control. The rules remain fixed, but the outcome does not.