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A Computer Composing and Playing Jazz
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has some unusual teaching programs. One PhD student, Øyvind Brandtsegg, is a graduate of the jazz program and this article describes how has developed a computer program and a musical instrument for improvisation. The PhD student is 36 years old and is at the same time a composer, a musician and computer programmer. His 'computer instrument' can take any recorded sound as input and split it into a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds. 'These fragments may be infinitely reshuffled, making it possible to vary the music with no change in the fundamental theme.'" Brandtsegg improvisational software is called ImproSculpt; his site contains several selections from his musical output, including "some pieces made with the predecessor of ImproSculpt," called FollowMe.
"can take any recorded sound as input and split it into a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds."
Yeah, that's called granular synthesis, and it's been around for awhile. There are a number of free and inexpensive grain cloud generators available...I wrote one myself, actually (http://atomiccloud.gersic.com/).
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
There's been a small amount of previous research in jazz solo composition, including a real-time solo-trading system that learns solo styles from data. Here's one paper describing the system that seems to have made the most progress.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It may sound random, but one of the things that allegedly makes jazz interesting is the reaction to other players. If another player does something interesting, then you react to it and mirror it in your own way. It's sort of "orchestral swarm theory". I can't say this is true of all players, however.
Give Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz a listen for an example of this type of skronk in action. Not everyone's cup of tea, but it's worth giving it a shot nonetheless.
Raymond Scott is pretty much the "grandfather" of computer generated music. His mechanical composing tools predate just about everything else in the genre. http://www.raymondscott.com/
Read what you just wrote then slap yourself for me. You should have just stopped at "Jazz is". "Improv" appears 19 times in the 37 paragraphs about Jazz on Wikipedia. Counterpoint appears zero times.
+0 Meh
Reminds me of generative music: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music#Software Interesting stuff from a theoretical point of view, but I can't say I've ever heard any that sounds good. Likewise, throwing up random pixels on a monitor might yield an eye-catching image one in a million times, but it's mostly pure noise. I think you need a human hand to direct any music worth listening to. After all, it's we human who listen to the stuff, not computers. Then again, I won't rule out the possibility for the future.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/