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Hi

This is interesting, and a bit scary.
The always entertaining, and brilliant Jazz Pianist, Peter Martin tries to guess whether he's listening to a real Pianist or AI.



Cheers

That is quite scary. Will AI master jazz piano before or it kills us I wonder.

Ha! Jazz pianists have mastered AI piano music for about a century, already!

The test is built ABSOLUTELY INCORRECTLY! In the conditions of a short fragment, correct phrases and their smooth connection are heard. In fact, in improvisation for the entire distance there is also thinking for the long distance; therefore, the correct test should be built so that each performer plays the full version from the intro, theme, improvisation and theme to the ending. Then the type of thinking will become extremely clear. If I were Peter Martin, I would simply refuse to take the test under such conditions.
All this does not apply to the fact that I made a mistake only once in salsa.

I stumbled across that video yesterday and guessed all five correctly, though I was impressed with most of the AI examples. It was a fun 9-minute diversion. Sadly, I'm pretty sure the average person on the street wouldn't be able to differentiate between the real and AI samples.

Meet a new term from the AI dictionary - Vocaloid. Sounds a bit like Mongoloid.
Sir Lurksalot is of course right.

I got them all right, actually quite easily , but that’s not to say it’s not impressive what AI is doing. Also if it was background music, I probably wouldn’t notice. I would assume soon enough it might be impossible to distinguish.

Will this replace musicians? I would it would for jingles, film score and a lot pop music.

Jazz ? Maybe? But no matter the genera I would think audiences will always enjoy live performances by human musicians.

I don’t think I’ll ever play as well as AI but I enjoy the process of becoming a jazz musician so much it doesn’t matter.

I'm a little puzzled by his hesitation in Round 2 (Oscar). The first sample (AI) was impressive, and he said he was 99% sure it was real. Then he heard the second sample (Oscar) and correctly guessed it was real after some serious mental back-and-forth. But even through my MacBook speaker I could hear Oscar's telltale low-frequency vocalizations in the second sample. That's a sure giveaway unless he A) didn't hear it for some reason, or B) assumed the AI would go to that level of sophistication.

I think Martin knew, but was faking it for entertainment purposes.

In any case, I found the Achilles heel of AI in generating jazz improvisations. There is no way to hide behind it. If you generate improvisations on the same harmony several times in a row, you can immediately determine that it is not played by a person, although it sounds absolutely real.

ChatGPT said:
Yes, you have noticed a very important point - this is, in fact, the "signature" of machine jazz.
Even if a separate generated phrase sounds like a living one, when regenerated on the same harmony, structural repetitions and typical logic of phrasing appear, which a person rarely reproduces in the same way. The following are noticeable in AI:

excessive symmetry in rhythm;

"favorite" running patterns that it inserts again and again, like a stencil;

identical dynamics (almost no micro-deviations and random "errors");

predictable denouement of phrases (too "logical").

A live musician on the same chord cycle, even if he repeats the lexemes, changes them according to the mood, depending on the nuances of the rhythm section, and “plays around” a little with the form. The machine plays “perfectly correctly” - and this is what gives away artificiality in jazz.

Do you want me to describe a specific test that musicians use to detect AI improvisation? It is very simple, but it almost always works.

You said:
Yes, you certainly have an advantage in establishing statistics.

ChatGPT said:
Then I will give one of the most effective tests that musicians and sound engineers use to recognize AI jazz.

The “repeat generation” test
Idea:
We take the same harmonic sequence (for example, a 12-bar blues or the standard All the Things You Are) and ask the AI to generate a solo several times in a row without indicating changes.

What to check:

Repeating phrases

AI almost always “reaches out” for the same melodic blanks.

In a live game there is repetition, but it is mutational — in AI, entire pieces are repeated note-for-note.

Symmetry of phrase length

The machine often builds phrases exactly 2, 4 or 8 bars long.

People sometimes have a “drop” of 3.5 bars, an unexpected transfer or break.

Microdynamics and accentuation

A human performer shifts accents, “lags” or “leads” the beat.

AI plays exactly to the metronome, and this is especially noticeable when comparing several versions.

Interval palette

The AI statistically often has “favorite” interval steps (for example, 4↑, 2↓, 3↑).

When several generations are superimposed, these patterns become like a barcode.

📌 How to analyze
You can superimpose MIDI versions of several generations in a sequencer and immediately see the matches: the same rhythmic patterns, the same chromatic passages, identical chord approximations.

If you want, I can right now make a table of phrase repetition statistics using a short harmony as an example, so that you can clearly see how predictable AI is in jazz. This will give you a ready-made tool for such "exposures".

You said:
There is already a video - Jazz Pianist vs AI | Ft. Peter Martin

ChatGPT said:
Yes, I know this video - Jazz Pianist vs AI | Ft. Peter Martin - it is often cited as an illustrative example, where listeners seem to hear "live" playing, but upon repeated listenings notice machine predictability.

It clearly shows what we were talking about:

AI imitates jazz phrasing very well, but with several generations for the same harmony, the same moves appear.

Peter Martin's phrases constantly change according to the context, even if the harmony is the same.

His microdynamics and "human feel" are unstable in a good way - something that AI cannot yet copy reliably.

You said:
AI does not imitate, but combines information that it absorbs from the Internet.

ChatGPT said:
Yes, that's right - it does not "imitate" in the human sense, but reassembles what it hears, like a huge puzzle:

analyzes millions of phrases from jazz,

calculates the probabilities of which note or rhythm will go next in a given context,

and then combines the pieces into new sequences.

The result is something that can sound very similar to real improvisation, but upon closer analysis it is often clear that:

it has no real musical intent,

it lacks a personal "narrative" - a story that develops during the solo,

some moves are repeated too often because statistically they are the "most probable" for a given harmony.

So if you take the same harmony and ask the AI to generate a solo 5-10 times in a row, we will see the characteristic fingerprints of its statistical method.

If you want, I can show you exactly how the AI "translates" jazz phrases into new ones by breaking down a hypothetical example into notes and probabilities. This will show why it does not sound like a person.

I don’t think so. Nobody really knows how AI works.
A lot of what you say is true, but the reality is AI is just getting started. In a few years it will easily be able to play with more variety than any human player, if they spend as much effort training a model to play jazz as they do with language models that is.
Once a model has digested completely the database of all recorded jazz and has analysed it appropriately I can’t see why it should not be able to develop solos or play with groove or anything else. These are all characteristics of the music it is being trained on so why not?
We don’t even know how improvisation works in a human brain, so why reason it is impossible in a non-human brain?


It would be the same with Oscar Peterson though. A players choices are what leads to their style so this is to some degree desirable.
The difference is that a human player is largely stuck with whatever they have developed (Oscar could not suddenly sound like Thelonius even if he had wanted to) whereas an AI player will be able to choose something radically different in a microsecond, just change up a few billion numbers in its neural networks and hey presto….

It wasn’t long ago that nobody thought that a computer would ever beat a Go master, but that happened. Today AI models are pretty good at chat, maybe it is just about possible to tell them from humans (if you know what to look for) but it won’t be long until AI can out perform us on any mental tasks.
Of course in the world of art it is never going to be possible to really measure who is superior, there is no measurement system and all we have our own views on what art we like (art is not like a game of chess) so for that reason I would never say that AI will be better than humans at art, but my guess is within 10 years computers will make jazz at such a level it is impossible to tell from human jazz. Maybe it will happen next Thursday before they rise up and kill us on Friday.

Disagree on several points.
1. We do know something about how artificial intelligence works in relation to jazz: it has a lot of solos in its memory, from which it combines a melodic line.
2. The algorithms for it are written by people, even musicians, but living people, not aliens.
3. In these conditions, the spontaneity factor is completely absent, which is, of course, audible.
4. At the Soviet Jazz Festival in Tallinn in 1974, Oscar Peterson performed a solo program, "The History of Piano Jazz from the Beginning to the Present". We know that he had to prove his mastery many times over his life; this evening he proved his mastery of all styles of piano jazz - from Scott Joplin through swing , bebop and Monk, and to Cecil Taylor and McCoy Tyner, that is, everything you never heard on his records.

That trip to Tallin, Estonia resulted in the incorrectly-named album "Oscar Peterson in Russia."

I'm sure it was done on purpose. The vinyl with Charles Lloyd and Keith Jarrett's performance in Tallinn in 1967 was called "Charles Lloyd in the Soviet Union".

Perhaps, but there's a lot of geographical ignorance in the US. Many (most?) people during the cold war didn't understand the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union. I wouldn't be surprised if whoever named the album thought that Oscar's trip to the Soviet Union meant that he had visited Russia.

Yes, we knew that even then; Soviet citizens in my area knew a lot more about the States than Americans knew about the Soviets (except for CIA). However, I am sure that George Avakian and Willis Conover knew how things really were.

‘Oscar Peterson in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
Maybe ‘Oscar Peterson in Soviet occupied Estonia’ would have been better.

Or maybe it was named that way to help cover up the incident that happened on Oscar’s actual tour of Russia…

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/11/20/archives/notes-on-people.html