Scientific American reports that “jazz-playing computers and robots could soon yield clues about how to help people collaborate with machines, researchers say.”  

“The new project, called MUSICA (short for Musical Improvising Collaborative Agent), aims to develop a musical device that can improvise a jazz solo in response to human partners, just as real jazz musicians improvise  alongside one another.”  

“MUSICA is part of a new program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. military responsible for developing new technologies. The project is designed to explore new ways that people can interact with computers and robots.”