Jordan Rudess is a rock keyboard player whose concerts sell out around the world. He works with a team of computer scientists at the MIT Media Labto make his synthesisers do amazing things. Together they created an AI musician called JAM_BOT to play with him on-stage.
Jordan’s bot learnt the different ways he plays by the team giving it lots of his music. It learned about the rhythms and melodies he uses. It could then compose its own versions of his music when prompted.
JAM_BOT AI plays along on-stage
Jordan also trained JAM_BOT to play with him. It could carry on playing music that Jordan had started, or create a backing track to music he was currently playing. Jordan was able to choose how JAM_BOT played with him on stage using the keys on his keyboard.
What happened next?
The resulting concert was a mix of performer and AI with a delighted audience (and computer science team). Afterwards Jordan said “It’s been pretty mind-blowing to create this tech-based version of myself – like looking into a real-time musical mirror.”
Jo Brodie and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
More on …
- A model of virtuosity (2024) MIT News [EXTERNAL]
- Acclaimed keyboardist Jordan Rudess’s collaboration with the MIT Media Lab culminates in live improvisation between an AI “jam_bot” and the artist.
We have LOTS of articles about music, audio and computer science. Have a look in these themed portals for more:
- Music and AI
- Music, Digital or Not
- Audio Engineering
- Read more about Music and AI in our mini-magazine “A Bit of CS4FN” issue 6 [COMING SOON]
Getting Technical
- The jam_bot, a Real-Time System for Collaborative Free Improvisation with Music Language Models (2025) by Lancelot Blanchard, Perry Naseck, Stephen Brade, Kimaya Lecamwasam, Jordan Rudess, Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang, Joseph Paradiso [EXTERNAL]
- click on ‘Paper’ to read the original article, based on a poster presented at ISMIR, the International Society for Music Information Retrieval.
- Additional JAM-BOT resources [EXTERNAL]
- here you can also listen to some of the pieces of music.
Subscribe to be notified whenever we publish a new post to the CS4FN blog.
cs4fn 