[Alan Brinton]

I failed the test. I don’t want to give anything away, but I think I understand why. I had no problem (in my opinion) picking the best of the three tunes. (I may have been thrown off, too, by the stunning performances by the musicians.) As I understand it, there has been computer generation of Bach style compositions in the past, some of which sound pretty authentic.

Band-in-a Box has some composing functions, that I guess could be meaningfully used mainly for jazz melodies. BIAB has improvisation on chord progressions by professional musicians (“Real Tracks”) and more mundane midi instrument solo generation. For jazz players, at least, BIAB provides a context in which we can do some experimentation of our own. So if you are working on a tune, you can call up Real Track improvisation of, say, a guitar solo, or you can generate creation of a midi instrument solo. Some of these, especially the Real Track solos, are not bad. If you were expecting to be playing with a guitarist, for example, and working on a tune, you could generate alternative Real Track guitar solos and play along with them with accompanying bass, drums, rhythm guitar, whatever, while practicing on your instrument. You can mute or adjust the volume of whichever tracks you like in the process of working on the tune. You can also ad reverb.