The Responsive Environments group at the MIT Media Lab is collaborating with GRAMMY-winning keyboardist and CAST Visiting Artist Jordan Rudess to produce jam_bot, a Generative AI Music System developed with Rudess to support real-time human-AI co-created improvisation, and trained on his playing. At the heart of this project is a simple idea: this technology is not here to replace musicians, but to expand their creative possibilities and inspire new ways of making music.
jam_bot was developed in the Responsive Environments group at the MIT Media Lab by Lancelot Blanchard, Perry Naseck, and Professor Joseph A. Paradiso, who have been in continuous collaboration with Rudess since 2023.
The models powering the jam_bot are pre-trained using an academic dataset of musical transcriptions and then fine-tuned on performances Rudess recorded specifically for the project. That distinction is central to the project. jam_bot is not intended as a general-purpose music generator trained to imitate a catalog of other artists. It is a system developed in collaboration with a specific musician, using his own playing, to extend what he can create and perform live.