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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01663 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01663/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12247/) (2018)
- [Generative artificial intelligence enhances creativity but reduces the diversity of novel content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00506/) (2023)
- [Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08872/) (2025)
- [Stay on topic with Classifier-Free Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17806/) (2023)
- [Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13248/) (2024)
- [RAPID: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Long Text Generation with Writing Planning and Information Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00751/) (2025)
- [Aria-MIDI: A Dataset of Piano MIDI Files for Symbolic Music Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15071/) (2025)
- [Live Music Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04651/) (2025)
- [Scaling Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Symbolic Piano Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23869/) (2025)
- [Motifs, Phrases, and Beyond: The Modelling of Structure in Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07995/) (2024)
- [ReaLJam: Real-Time Human-AI Music Jamming with Reinforcement Learning-Tuned Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21267/) (2025)
- [Sequentially Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02299/) (2023)
- [Generative AI and Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17241/) (2025)
- [The Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Ideation and the performance of Innovation Teams (Preprint)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18357/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.