It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, but so far it has been difficult for jazz musicians to actually define what'swing' is. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany think they have found out, after their study revealed that the rhythm is the result of micro-delays in musical timing. Traditionally, swing is thought to be added to a piece of music when quavers - notes that are an eighth of the duration of a whole note - are played with uneven lengths. The researchers played manipulated pieces of music to jazz musicians, to see if changes in timing affected their perception of its swing. It was found that when the notes on beat one and three were delayed by 30 milliseconds, the musicians were 7.48 times more likely to rate the music as having more swing. However, the microtiming deviations were so small that they were imperceptible to professional jazz musicians, suggesting they use them unconsciously.

Students from the Technion's Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science in Haifa, Nadav Bhonker (already graduated) and Shunit Haviv Hakimi, together with their advisor Professor Ran El-Yaniv have shown that it is possible to model and optimize personalized jazz preferences using artificial intelligence. Their paper on the research called the BebopNet project was published in the Proceedings of 21st International Society of Music Information Retrieval Conference. To people involved in the development of artificial intelligence technologies this is great news. The idea that something artistic, especially a field as personalized as jazz, can be recreated by AI is a major breakthrough. AI is a form of computer and as such can only really do what it has been pre-programmed to do and nothing as original as the composition of new and truly artistic sounding music.

The game of Go played between a DeepMind computer program and a human champion created an existential crisis of sorts for Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and professor at Oxford University. "I've always compared doing mathematics to playing the game of Go," he says, and Go is not supposed to be a game that a computer can easily play because it requires intuition and creativity. So when du Sautoy saw DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, he thought that there had been a sea change in artificial intelligence that would impact other creative realms. He set out to investigate the role that AI can play in helping us understand creativity, and ended up writing The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI (Harvard University Press). The Verge spoke to du Sautoy about different types of creativity, AI helping humans become more creative (instead of replacing them), and the creative fields where artificial intelligence struggles most.

Marcus is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, quite a mouthful.

Let's not bother with a poker face here. Released late Thursday, "Perfect Illusion" is a stomping disco-rock jam with a killer robot-Motown groove, buckets of scuzz-punk guitar fuzz and a key change designed to trigger Pavlovian fist-pumps. It has a melody that will burrow into your brain before the 2-minute mark. And like all the best pop songs, it can't decide if it's sad or happy, paranoid or ecstatic; the tune lifts you up at the same time that it marches over you, a blast of serotonin under constant threat of reuptake. "I don't need eyes to see / I felt you touching me," Lady Gaga sings, her voice fraying at the edges.