Last April, in the midst of the pandemic's first wave, the jazz pianist Dan Tepfer was on a call with his friend Ben Wendel, a jazz saxophonist. Wendel had flown to Maui just before the lockdown, and now he was stuck there--not so terrible, except that he was desperate to play music with friends back in New York. He asked Tepfer, a self-taught coder, whether any technology existed that would let him play in real time with someone so far away. Tepfer, who lives in Brooklyn, did a quick calculation: Wendel was forty-nine hundred miles from New York; a flawless signal, travelling at the speed of light from Maui, would take twenty-six milliseconds to arrive. Studies showed that faster rhythms couldn't be coherently sustained with time lags longer than twenty milliseconds or so.

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.