Keynote Lecture: George Lewis

Innovative trombonist, philosopher and academic George Lewis presents his paper “Is Our Machines Learning Yet?” Machine Learning’s Challenge to Improvisation and the Aesthetic . George Lewis is Professor of American Music at Columbia University, a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow and one of the world’s foremost artists and thinkers working at the intersection of music, improvisation and artificial intelligence. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Akademie der Künste Berlin and the British Academy, Lewis is internationally recognised for his groundbreaking contributions as a composer, performer and scholar. His opera The Comet was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize. For this free Melbourne International Jazz Festival keynote at Monash University, he shares insights from decades of investigation into improvisation, technology and the aesthetic challenges posed by machine learning.