Improvisation, systems, and the Miles Davis test

Recently, I have been participating in a doctoral seminar on new media and systems. With my improvisational mind, I have been exploring thoughts about improvisation and systems. One way to look at the intersection between improvisation and systems would be to invoke a thought experiment that we could call the Miles Davis test. The Miles Davis test could function as a successor to the Turing test. To illustrate what the Miles Davis test is, let me first illustrate what the Turing test is. The turing test was a test invented by Alan Turing in 1936. He wondered if computers could 'think'. A computer would pass the Turing test if it succeeded in making another human being think that she were actually interacting with another human being instead of a computer. In two high profile cases, computers might have succeeded in doing so. Firstly in 1997 when an IBM computer (in second instance) named Deep Blue beat the then world champion in chess Gary Kasparov. And recently, when another IBM computer named Watson won the American gameshow Jeopardy beating human competitors at this famously analogue game. The fact that only recently a computer could beat people playing Jeopardy points to what the Miles Davis test is getting at.

In the Miles Davis test, a computer would pass, if it made a music loving human being believe it was a human being improvising music live.

So IBM, what about that challenge?

The funny thing is that when I mentioned this test to a fellow PhD student named Eric Matheny, he pointed me to Pat Metheny's Orchestrion project. In this project, Pat Metheny, inspired by the player piano of his grandfather, created an orchestrion. An orchestrion is an ensemble of instruments that can all be played by providing inputs, like a computer prgram or physical playing roles. Pat's orchestrion is a 21st century variant on the old orchestrions which he can play either through playing live on his own guitar, or by programming it electronically. In a short film on his website, Pat explains the idea and gives a good impression of how his 21st century orchestrion works.



The beautiful thing about it is that Pat's orchestrion seems to blur the line between human-system interaction, because Pat plays all the instruments through his guitar himself, yet at the same time improvises 'with' the instruments. Thereby providing a reflexive approximation of the Miels Davis test. Or at least, somehow confusing the linear notion of that test and challenging it with an even more complex experience which might just be showing that IBM's Deep Blue and Watson, like his orchestrion, were programmed by human beings, and that is the only reason why they can fool us. Not by 'thinking' of themselves?

What are your thoughts....?