“All of the Rules of Jazz”

Abstract

Though improvising computer systems are hardly new, jazz has recently become the focus of a number of novel computer music projects aimed at convincingly improvising alongside humans, with a particular focus on the use of machine learning to imitate human styles. The attempt to implement a sort of Turing test for jazz, and interest from organizations like DARPA in the results, raises important questions about the nature of improvisation and musical style, but also about the ways jazz comes popularly to stand for such broad concepts as “conversation” or “democracy.” This essay explores these questions by considering robots that play straight-ahead neoclassical jazz alongside George Lewis’s free-improvising Voyager system, reading the technical details of such projects in terms of the ways they theorize the recognition and production of style, but also in terms of the political implications of human-computer musicking in an age of algorithmic surveillance and big data.

Social robotics in music education: A systematic review

“…Scimeca et al (2020), in turn, utilized a minimalist experimental platform based on a robotic arm equipped with a single elastic finger to examine on a systematic basis both motor control and the outcome resulting from piano sounds. Miller (2020) experimented with robots that played live neoclassical jazz combined with free improvisation. Finally, the study undertaken by Krzyżaniak (2020) resorted to swarms of autonomous musical robots for the purpose of analyzing human-robot and robot-robot interaction-e.g., when musical robots listen to, learn from, and respond to each other while improvising music together.…”