AI Learns to Play Piano in the Style of Jazz Greats

Learning Jazz Pianist Style with Cross-Attention Conditioning

Researchers fine-tuned Aria, a piano MIDI transformer, with a gated cross-attention layer that reads a learned embedding for each of twelve jazz pianists, from Art Tatum to Dick Hyman. A sliding pianist classifier attributes conditioned continuations to the intended pianist 70% of the time, versus 37% without conditioning, while perplexity barely moves. A classifier trained only on generated music identifies real recordings with 95% accuracy.