Jazz AI (Cont)

 

Improvisation is a form of spontaneous composition that uses predetermined structural elements, usually chords and scales. Jazz improvisation is understood as being free-form, but is controlled with rules. In Arabic music, there is Taqsim, guided by a different system of rules for improvisation—and similarly with Indian Raga. The eastern versions of improvisation have an additional cultural element that is more important than the West’s focus on improvisation for art’s sake. Interestingly, Taqsim may possibly have some connection with algorithms (simply a series of rules or instructions). The word algorithm is eponymous with Algoritmi, a Persian mathematician. The fact that jazz musicians can relate to physics (and vice versa) is perhaps not just coincidental. 

The curious thing about improvisation in anything is that there are always some rules or constraints that are not universal, e.g. a jazz player would be confused by the rules of Taqsim because jazz improvisation is based on 7-note chord scales, whereas Taqsim is based on tetrachords or other scale sub-units. There is improvisation in classical music as well, but is defined as a Cadenza, that similarly constrains performance with a scored melody.

I don’t think there could ever be a universal definition of improvisation, although historically, the older forms of improvisation in other cultures have been integrated into Western music as a way to make it universal.

9/18/2017

[9/18/2024: A few days ago I was riffing on the idea of AI jazz improvisation. If a soloist has a “tool box” of techniques to use in a solo: arpeggios, pentatonics, and so on, how is that unlike AI randomly using “tools” (random phrases)? In classical composition, motifs or cells of 3-5 notes can be used to build a whole composition. What I want to do with AI is to load those melodic or rhythmic motifs into a musical LLM and have it generate improvisations based on the “seeds”. This is how AI has been used in the past, which I think is more interesting and creative than generating music where we don’t know how the random permutations are created–a general problem with anything controlled by black boxes. It also gives us authorship if we designed the seeds. What I’d like to see is a short film on how AI generates songs as a reverse-engineering because that’s how I originally learned music–by doing that with songs I liked].