Source: Business Insider, Aug 2015
Jazz musician and computer scientist Kelland Thomas is building an AI program that can learn to play jazz and jam with the best of them, under a DARPA-funded project that aims to improve how we communicate with computers.
“A jazz musician improvises, given certain structures and certain constraints and certain basic guidelines that musicians are all working with,” Thomas told Tech Insider. “Our system is going to be an improvisational system. So yeah, it will be able to jam.”
Thomas and his team will first build a database of thousands of transcribed musical performances by the best jazz improvisers, including Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker. Then, using machine learning techniques, they’ll “train” the AI system with this database.