Progressive Rock
Jordan Rudess will play two shows on 3 October at MIT’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall, as part of the first MIT Future Fest, alongside jam_bot, an AI model developed with him and trained on his own way of playing.
The system listens to what he plays, responds to it, and at the same time generates material for the other musicians on stage to play. «What excites me isn’t the technology itself,» sums up the Dream Theater keyboardist, «it’s where it can take me musically.»
The highlight of the evening is a world premiere: Rudess and jam_bot improvising with the MIT Chamber Chorus, with the machine generating the material the choir sings in real time. The programme will range from Baroque counterpoint to progressive rock and is built entirely around improvisation, so neither of the two sessions — at five and eight in the evening, three hundred seats each — will sound the same.
The project has been in the works for three years at the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with Lancelot Blanchard, Perry Naseck and professor Joseph A. Paradiso, during Rudess’s residency as a distinguished visiting artist at the Center for Art, Science & Technology.
Rudess joined Dream Theater in 1999, in time for «Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory». Since then he’s kept adding new instruments — the Continuum Fingerboard, the Haken — and has developed touchscreen apps like MorphWiz and GeoShred through his company, Wizdom Music.
Text by Sergi Colomines