Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with something a bit different, something I’ve been calling “Jazz Magic Prediction”. It’s a silly name, I know, but it kinda fits. Basically, I wanted to see if I could somehow predict what a jazz musician is gonna play next, just based on what they’ve already played. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that’s what I thought, but I figured, why not give it a shot?
So, I started by just listening to a ton of jazz. You know, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, all the greats. I just immersed myself in it, trying to get a feel for the flow, the improvisation, the, uh… the “jazziness” of it all, I guess. It was fun, honestly, just kicking back and enjoying some good music.
After a while, I started to notice some, like, patterns, I guess you could call them. Like, certain phrases or licks that kept popping up, or ways that one solo would kind of “answer” another. It wasn’t anything super precise, more like a general vibe. But I thought, hey, maybe there’s something here.
Next, I grabbed a bunch of transcriptions of jazz solos. These are basically sheet music for improvised solos, which is kinda cool if you think about it. I started feeding these into my computer, just the notes, not any of the timing or anything. My idea was to see if I could find any statistical patterns in the note sequences.
This is where things got a bit tricky. I’m not really a programmer, but I know enough to be dangerous, I suppose. I used this old, beat-up laptop I had lying around and just started hacking away. I tried a bunch of different things, different algorithms, different ways of representing the data. Most of it didn’t work, which was kinda frustrating, but you know, that’s how it goes sometimes.
I spent hours just staring at the screen, tweaking code, running tests, and getting nowhere. It felt like I was just chasing my tail. But then, after a lot of trial and error, I finally got something that seemed to kinda work. It wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but it was able to predict the next note in a sequence with, like, a slightly better than random chance. Which is actually a pretty big deal, considering how unpredictable jazz is!
I’m not gonna pretend that I’ve cracked the code of jazz or anything. This is just a fun little experiment, and the results are far from perfect. But it’s kinda cool to think that there might be some hidden structure in all that improvisation. Or maybe it’s just my imagination. Who knows?
What I Did Today:
- Listened to a whole bunch of jazz music.
- Looked for patterns in the music.
- Got a hold of some jazz solo transcriptions.
- Wrote some code to analyze the transcriptions.
- Tried a ton of different things that didn’t work.
- Finally got something that kinda worked.
- Realized that I probably haven’t solved jazz.
Anyway, that’s my “Jazz Magic Prediction” story. It was a fun little project, even if it didn’t exactly revolutionize the world of music. But hey, you never know until you try, right? And who knows, maybe someone smarter than me will take this idea and actually do something amazing with it. Until then, I’ll just keep listening to my jazz records and dreaming of the day when computers can truly understand the magic of music.
