Dr Tom Williams

Bio: Dr Tom Williams is a musician, researcher and academic leader whose work spans jazz improvisation, guitar studies, music cognition and creative pedagogy. His doctoral research examined the cognitive and generative mechanisms underpinning contemporary jazz improvisation. His publications include contributions to major academic collections published by Routledge and Bloomsbury, exploring guitar organology, distortion, gender and musical identity. He has presented internationally on improvisation, performance, cultural representation and pedagogy. His research interests extend to interdisciplinary creative practice, artificial intelligence, educational innovation and the relationship between physical learning environments, artistic practice and creative industries education, connecting scholarly inquiry with professional practice and leadership.

Key research areas: jazz improvisation, cognition and creative strategies; organology and music technology; music pedagogies and creative practices; identity, gender and cultural representation in jazz. 

Selected outputs: 

• ‘Extended Range Instruments: Towards a New Organology of the Guitar’, in 21st Century Guitar: Evolutions and Augmentations (Bloomsbury, 2023)
• ‘Distorting Jazz Guitar: Distortion as Effect, Creative Tool and Extension of the Instrument’, in Distortion in Music Production: The Soul of Sonics (Routledge, 2023)
• ‘Degendering Jazz Guitar: Reimagining the Past—Realigning the Future’, in The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender (Routledge, 2022)
• ‘Lost Vocabulary Recovered: Applications for Practice and Pedagogy’ (Collaborative research project with Prof Rich Perks, presented at International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz, 2021)
• ‘Strategy in Contemporary Jazz Improvisation: Theory and Practice’, Doctoral Thesis (University of Surrey, 2016)

ORCID: 0000-0002-8945-138X                 Email: twilliams@acm.ac.uk