Automated Jazz Improvisation Robert M. Keller1 with contributions by Jon Gillick2, David Morrison3, Kevin Tang4 1 Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA, USA 2 Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA 3 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA 4 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA keller@cs.hmc.edu, jrgillick@wesleyan.edu, drmorr0@gmail.com, kt258@cornell.edu Abstract. I will demonstrate the jazz improvisational capabilities of Impro- Visor, a software tool originally intended to help jazz musicians work out solos prior to improvisation. As the name suggests, this tool provides various forms of advice regarding solo construction over chord changes. However, recent additions enable the tool to improvise entire choruses on its own in real-time. To reduce the overhead of creating grammars, and also to produce solos in specific styles, the tool now has a feature that enables it to learn a grammar for improvisation in a style from transcribed performances of solos by others. Samples may be found in reference [4]. Acknowledgment This research was supported by grant 0753306 from the National Science Foundation and a faculty enhancement grant from the Mellon Foundation. References 1. Keller, R. and Morrison, D.: A Grammatical Approach to Automatic Improvisation, In: Proceedings Fourth Sound and Music Computing Conference, Lefkada, Greece, July (2007) 2. Gillick, J., Tang, K., and Keller, R.: Learning Jazz Grammars, In: Proceedings Sixth Sound and Music Computing Conference, Porto, Portugal, pp. 125--130 (2009) 3. Keller, R. et al.: Jazz Improvisation Advisor, http://www.impro-visor.com (2009) 4. http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor/Solos/index.html 288