About
Thomas Irvine is Deputy Director of the University of Southampton Web Science Institute, Southampton's centre for critical and interdisciplinary AI and web technology. Together with his colleagues Dame Wendy Hall and Professor Les Carr he coordinates AI@Southampton, the University's main AI initiative.
He is a historian of music and music technology from 1500 CE to the present. His current research focuses on AI Music and and global music history. He is the author of Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter 1770-1839 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and the co-editor, with Neil Gregor, of Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor (Berghahn, 2019).
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- AI and Music
- Global History of Music
Current research
Thomas Irvine co-directs the University of Southampton AI Music Lab.
He is co-writing (with Christopher J. Smith) a global history of art and vernacular music from 1500 CE to the present that centres concepts of extraction, labour, energy and data. He and Smith are the co-executive producers of the podcast Sounding History.
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
Teaching
AI Music (critical and historical perspectives)
Music and sustainability
Music and the British Empire
Jazz history
Critical musicology
Biography
Thomas (Tom) Irvine was born in Munich to American parents and grew up in Stony Brook, NY, USA. After studying viola at conservatoire (at the University of Michigan School of Music and Dance, the Shepherd School of Rice University and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music) he moved to Germany and where he worked as a musician, arts manager and school teacher.
In 1999 he returned to the US to study performance practice and musicology at Cornell University, taking a PhD in 2005. From 2002-2006 he was a DAAD scholar, lecturer and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Würzburg Institute of Musicology. He joined the University of Southampton in 2006.
From 2017 to 2025 he was an Associate Director of the Web Science Institute before being appointed Deputy Director in 2025. In Music he has served as Doctoral Programme Director, Director of Programmes and, from 2022-2026, Head of Department.
From 2019 to 2023 he was a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute (the UK’s national institution for AI and data science). In 2015-2016 he held a Mid-Career Fellowship of the British Academy.