Research Seminar Series: Professor George E. Lewis, Columbia University, New York - “Is Our Machines Learning Yet?” Machine Learning’s Challenge to Improvisation and the Aesthetic

Research Seminar followed by light refreshments.

Abstract

Since 1979 I have drawn upon AI and practices of free improvisation in creating a kind of music making that includes machine subjectivities as central actors in a real-time, co-created sociality. These “creative machines” have been designed to stake out musical territory, assess and respond to conditions, and assert identities and positions—all aspects of improvisative interaction, both within and beyond the domain of music.  Today, improvisations made by creative musical machines are often indistinguishable from those created by humans. For many, this is a truly unsettling prospect, not least because musical creation can no longer be portrayed as the exclusive and ineffable province of designated superpeople.  However, the advent of musical machine learning has fully corroborated my observation from 2000 that "as notions about the nature and function of music become embedded into the structure of software-based musical systems and compositions, interactions with these systems tend to reveal characteristics of the communities of thought and culture that produced them." These communities now include whoever and whatever ideologies and practices the machines and their programmers happen to be drawing from, whether it be Google’s early ideology of using machine learning to create “compelling” art and music, or chatbots that devolve into racist, sexist, and even genocidal diatribes before being taken offline. If algorithms that “listen” to a corpus of musical behavior and "learn" to produce musical structures that create variations on that behavior are ultimately reproducing the cultural values embedded in that music, how can we create new musical and cultural values from an existing corpus?

Bio

George Lewis (b. 1952) is Professor of American Music at Columbia University. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and the British Academy. A MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, Lewis is a pioneer in the development of improvising AI software, and his opera The Comet was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize. His works have been performed at the BBC Proms, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wiener Festwochen, and others, by ensembles worldwide. Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, and others.

George Lewis (* 1952) ist Professor für amerikanische Musik an der Columbia University. Er ist Mitglied der Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, der American Academy of Arts and Sciences, der American Academy of Arts and Letters, der Akademie der Künste Berlin und der British Academy.  Zu weiteren Auszeichnungen zählen ein MacArthur-Stipendium (2002) sowie ein Guggenheim-Stipendium (2015). Lewis gilt als Pionier in der Entwicklung von improvisierender KI-Software, und seine Oper „The Comet“ war Finalist für den Pulitzer-Preis 2025.  Seine Werke wurden bei den BBC Proms, den Donaueschinger Musiktagen, den Wiener Festwochen und anderen Festivals von Ensembles aus aller Welt aufgeführt. Lewis hat Ehrendoktorwürden von der University of Edinburgh und der Harvard University u.a.