My friend and serial colleague David Levitt wrote his PhD thesis about applying AI to Jazz improvisation at MIT EECS in 1981, titled "A Melody Description System for Jazz Improvisation". His PhD advisor was Marvin Minsky.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/32122

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/32122/0827896...

>A Melody Description System for Jazz Improvisation

>This thesis describes a program which embodies several computational aspects of music improvisation and composition. Given an initial melody and harmonic outline, the program produces a single voice of improvisation. While the improvisation is intended to resemble a jazz (eg. "swing" or "bebop") solo, the program's descriptive techniques reflect computational elements common to a range of tonal music. These include building up phrases from partial descriptions, recognizing interesting features, and re-examining a remembered phrase to produce a variation in a new context. Throughout, the program uses various ideas of similarity, repeated patterns, defaults, and mutually constraining structures, trying to anticipate the audience's expectations to make the improvisations understandable and interesting.

David also developed an early musical/graphical Mac app called "Harmony Grid", and a visual programming language called "Hookup" for controlling and integrating MIDI and hardware and software like the Macromedia Director player library. David shared an office at the MIT AI Lab's "Music Hacker's Hangout" with Miller Puckette, who developed Max/MSP and PD. He later worked on Body Electric aka Bounce, another MIDI supporting visual programming language for real time VR simulation developed by Chuck Blanchard at VPL.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-58126-7_...

>Representing Musical Relationships in the Harmony Grid

>One of the most difficult questions of multimedia design is when is it appropriate to use a given medium or mode of interaction. Sometimes the answer is not as obvious as it might seem. For instance, a program which manipulates music obviously has to be capable of playing music, presenting auditory information, but to what extent should the interface to the program be an auditory one? This chapter describes one such program which teaches about music, but with which the student interacts using a two-dimensional spatial representation of musical relationships. In other words a cross-modality mapping occurs. This kind of mapping appears to be especially successful because variants of it have been applied to good educational effect more than once. Indeed, Chapter 12 describes a successful use of a different but closely related cross-modality mapping. A very interesting and open question is: why is this mapping appropriate, where others may not be?

>1. Introduction

>The Harmony Grid was developed to help musicians and non-musicians visualize harmonic relationships in the traditional western 12-semitone chromatic system. It spatially represents some of the thinking that goes on when a composer or improvisor describes a melody or chord progression: 'Now the chord root is descending on the circle of fifths; now the melody is ascending . . chromatically; now it's descending on the whole tone scale~ .. ' and so on. Articulately or not, we create these structures when we make and appreciate music - dynamic ways of thinking about notes as 'near' each other. The Harmony Grid lets us visualize these musical relationships as adjacencies in fields of spatial intervals, displayed as two-dimensional grids.

Here he is demonstrating his "Music Box" software, and talking about his research at the MIT AI Lab and Atari Cambridge Research Lab:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys

There'a a link to great old photo of David in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860722

More stuff about Hookup and Bounce:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788773