While generative models for music composition are increasingly capable, their adoption by musicians is hindered by text-prompting, an asynchronous workflow disconnected from the embodied, responsive nature of instrumental performance. To address this, we introduce Aria-Duet, an interactive system facilitating a real-time musical duet between a human pianist and Aria, a state-of-the-art generative model, using a Yamaha Disklavier as a shared physical interface. The framework enables a turn-taking collaboration: the user performs, signals a handover, and the model generates a coherent continuation performed acoustically on the piano. Beyond describing the technical architecture enabling this low-latency interaction, we analyze the system's output from a musicological perspective, finding the model can maintain stylistic semantics and develop coherent phrasal ideas, demonstrating that such embodied systems can engage in musically sophisticated dialogue and open a promising new path for human-AI co-creation.

At least that was one wine critic's opinion of the new Sumika brand from Marks & Spencer. After all, sometimes you just want to have fun at home. In fact, companies have been developing all kinds of interesting products and services to make the leisurely side of our home lives more connected and more enjoyable. Streaming music services like Pandora and Spotify, as well as multi-room wireless speaker systems like Sonos, for example, allow people to enjoy the pleasures of synchronized whole home audio without the costs and hassles of running wires all over your house. Thanks to recent upgrades from Amazon and Google, households with multiple Echo or Google Home smart speakers can also start to benefit from this surprisingly enjoyable feature--once limited to high-end custom homes. For this to work, you'll need to configure your speakers to function together as a multiroom group in the respective Alexa and Google Home apps, but the process is straightforward.

Dan Tepfer is an acclaimed jazz pianist and composer who has played venues from Tokyo's Sumida Triphony Hall to New York's Village Vanguard. He also has a degree in astrophysics and writes computer programs. Born to a mother who sang in the Paris Opera and a plant-geneticist father who brought a Macintosh Plus home in the 1980s, Tepfer sees the worlds of art and science as entirely complementary. In his latest project, Acoustic Informatics, Tepfer uses a player piano, the automated instrument that occasionally appears in airports and Wild West saloons. Next month, he will present his first concert in New York City -- where he's lived for more than a decade -- to showcase this project at the Jazz Gallery, a venue known for its experimentation.