Three is a crowd? A prompt driven human-bot performance

This performance is an improvisational collaboration between a vocalist, an electronic musician, and a musical agent based on self organizing maps from curated music corpora. The back-and-forth in this musical conversation is based around the concept of a very simple control algorithm that controls the conversation through generated prompts. Each element of this performance controls and is controlled by the tightly regimented constraints around making musical meaning together. 'Three is a crowd?' is a continuation of Co-Creative Spaces presented at NIME 2023 and builds on both the experiences and software (CCCP) from that project. The agents in Co-Creative Spaces generate sound by picking from a corpus of recorded material from the human musicians. How these collections were curated and put together was an important artistic decision for the co-creation process. This gave the musicians a closeness to the material that was seen as positive, but at the same time there was a recurring wish that the agents could have their own voice to a greater extent. "Three is a crowd?" is the first step in exploring other ways of giving the non-human agents more explicit agency in a performance by introducing a simple control algorithm that will guide the musical performance through text-based prompts.