Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium: Thomas Irvine

Thomas Irvine will present a Richard Murphy Musicology Colloqium entitled "Jazz as Social Machine" in Bibbins 224.

"Artificial Intelligence makes lots of music these days, including jazz. This talk uses AIs that make jazz improvisations to investigate a world where humans and machines make things together (web scientists refer to such partnerships as "social machines.") I am interested in who these AI improvisers are, and if we should care for them in the way we should care for other sentient beings. To give the game away, I think it would be ungenerous not care about unsupervised machine learners who are actually doing the work of making AI music. AI jazz improvisors are unexplainable, like any number of other autonomous agents, in the sense that human intelligence cannot grasp the sheer size of the calculations that inform their agency. Their voices are their own: such paradoxes of computable inscrutability haunt any generative architecture. They are, paradoxically, as unexplainable as the artists whose creations they are meant to imitate. Standing in front of these one finds oneself in the same position as students of jazz have stood since people have made this music, not knowing for sure exactly how it works. Riffing on Paul Berliner’s classic account Thinking in Jazz, all generative AI agents are in a “never-ending state of getting there." This is surely not a state we would wish for a self-driving car, but it is one that we might appreciate in art, and one that many have come to treasure in jazz." - Thomas Irvine

About the Colloquium

The Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium was begun in 1992 by Professor Claudia Macdonald to foster an exchange of ideas on music between colleagues in both the Conservatory and the College. The series was expanded in 1997 to include outside speakers as well, and named in honor of Richard Murphy, who taught music history at Oberlin from 1946 to 1978, and was much revered and beloved by his students. He died in 1993.

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Conservatory visitors are asked to enter the complex through either Bibbins Hall’s east entrance (off College Place, across from the Oberlin College Bookstore) or the Conservatory Lounge’s west entrance (off S. Professor St., adjacent to the Conservatory Pond). All other entrances will be closed to the public.