Simulating Creativity in Jazz Performance

This paper considers the problem of simulating creativity in the domain of Jazz improvisation and accompaniment. Unlike most current approaches, we try to model the musicians’ behavior by taking into account their experience and how they use it with respect to the evolving contexts of live performance. To represent this experience we introduce the notion of Musical Memory, which exploits the principles of Case-Based Reasoning (Slade 1991). To produce live music using this Musical Memory we propose a problem solving method based on the notion of PACTs (Potential ACTions) that are activated according to the context and then combined in order to produce notes. We show that our model supports two of the main features of creativity, i.e. non-determinism and the absence of well-defined goals (Johnson-Laird 1992).