The Music Department's colloquium series continues this Wednesday with a talk by Professor Thomas Irvine, ‘Jazz as Social Machine’.

Jazz has always been a sociotechnical activity in which "no one knows everything but everyone knows something." It shares this quality with what Web Scientists call a "social machine." This talk takes a novel generative jazz algorithm, the Jazz Transformer (JT), as a springboard for critical reflections on the changing relations between computer science, musicology, and the Digital Humanities by placing AI jazz in the context of social machines. It offers a "reverse engineering" of the JT and its accompanying data set, the Weimar Jazz Database, as a way to explore how thinking about generative jazz AI can uncover hidden relations between Music Information Retrieval, traditional editorial musicology, and critical and postcolonial theory (e.g. Latour, Derrida, Foucault, and Sylvia Wynter). The result is a new perspective on AI jazz that frames it not only as a series of technical operations but also a social process in which musicians, critical scholars, and technologists can find each other, in knowledge and action, in a new kind of social machine.