The article explores the use of agentic software engineering (ASE) in the development of innovative audio software. It begins with a review of background work that lays out the challenges of longevity, interoperability and barriers to entry in digital music instrument creation, explaining recent developments in ASE and highlighting the possibility that ASE can lower barriers to entry and facilitate creation of interoperable software with greater longevity. Following that, we present case studies wherein we used ASE technology in three distinct ways to develop audio software in the C++ language with the JUCE framework. In case study 1, we re-implement Laurie Spiegel's Music Mouse' software as a native plugin. In case study 2, we translate Pachet's Continuator' system from Python into a native plugin. In case study 3, we develop a new 3D user interface for an existing `tracker' sequencer using OpenGL. We describe the experiences of the human developer in the case studies via autoethnographic discussion of the prompt logs and snapshots of the software as it was developed. We identify effective practice for ASE use in this domain and suggest future steps for the work involving evaluation of the method with non-programmer musicians.
Machine generation of symbolic music and digital audio are hot topics but there have been relatively few digital musical instruments that integrate generative AI. Present musical AI tools are not artist centred and do not support experimentation or integrating into musical instruments or practices. This work introduces an inexpensive generative AI instrument platform based on a single board computer that connects via MIDI to other musical devices. The platform uses artist-collected datasets with models trained on a regular computer. This paper asks what the design space of intelligent musical instruments might look like when accessible and portable AI systems are available for artistic exploration. I contribute five examples of instruments created and tested through a two-year first-person artistic research process. These show that (re)mapping can replace retraining for discovering AI interaction, that fast input interleaving is a new co-creative strategy, that small-data AI models can be a transportable design resource, and that cheap hardware can lower barriers to inclusion. This work could enable artists to explore new interaction and performance schemes with intelligent musical instruments.
Almost every piece of recorded music you have ever heard was modified before it reached you; commercial releases rarely spring fully-formed from the mind of a musician. Despite the promise of music generation models for one-shot output, such fine-grained iterative refinement workflows are a complementary problem, and largely out of their reach. There is also a gap for musicians: while they can express what they want to hear, not all have the facility with studio production tools to implement the complex set of actions needed to realize these intuitions. We formalize this task as agentic post-production, wherein individual aspects of a song are targeted, refined, and combined into a final track. We argue the bottleneck is data: existing corpora do not reflect how realistic post-production chains map onto the vocabulary musicians and engineers actually use. We argue there is a language for modifying recorded music that is dense, consistent, and learnable. We introduce the Rule-based Instructions for Music Editing (RIME) framework, which generates realistic paired edit-instruction data from any baseline music dataset grounded in canonical methods, design patterns, and constraints derived from real production workflows. RIME leverages POEMS, a new toolkit that combines stem separation, mixing, and common studio effects for use by multimodal agents. We use RIME and POEMS to generate 3,000 pairs of edit instructions and ground truth audio, and use this data to evaluate existing multimodal LLMs as agents on this task, showing persistent challenges in current models' post-production capabilities. We also demonstrate RIME's ability to improve post-production agent performance via supervised fine-tuning. We see RIME as an early step toward iterative musical agents, collaborative systems that could transform music production much as interactive coding agents have reshaped software engineering.
Sound design workflows frequently oscillate between time-consuming library searches and the complexity of procedural synthesis, with practitioners typically relying on disconnected tools to address each challenge separately. This paper introduces Quality Audio Prototyping (QuAP), a working prototype that unifies content-based audio retrieval and procedural sound generation within a single interface, reducing the procedural distance between a narrative concept and its sonic realisation. QuAP integrates a similarity-based retrieval engine with real-time procedural audio models, complemented by a rule-based assistant that provides perceptually informed parameter guidance, offering definitions and recommendations derived from empirical optimisation rather than requiring prior synthesis knowledge. Preliminary evaluation confirms the viability of this approach: subjective assessment demonstrated statistically significant quality improvements in five of six embedded synthesis models, and an encoder ablation study established the preferred retrieval architecture on a sound effect dataset. A user evaluation with 16 practitioners confirmed the tool's workflow utility, with all participants agreeing that the parameter assistant preserved creative agency while lowering the barrier to procedural interaction.