The Ghost in the Keys: A Disklavier Demo for Human-AI Musical Co-Creativity

Louis Bradshaw, Alexander Spangher, Stella Biderman, Simon Colton

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 Creative AI (NeurIPS 2025) Creative AI

While generative models for music composition are increasingly capable, their adoption by musicians is hindered by text-prompting, an asynchronous workflow disconnected from the embodied, responsive nature of instrumental performance. To address this, we introduce Aria-Duet, an interactive system facilitating a real-time musical duet between a human pianist and Aria, a state-of-the-art generative model, using a Yamaha Disklavier as a shared physical interface. The framework enables a turn-taking collaboration: the user performs, signals a handover, and the model generates a coherent continuation performed acoustically on the piano. Beyond describing the technical architecture enabling this low-latency interaction, we analyze the system's output from a musicological perspective, finding the model can maintain stylistic semantics and develop coherent phrasal ideas, demonstrating that such embodied systems can engage in musically sophisticated dialogue and open a promising new path for human-AI co-creation.