Ritwik Banerji, assistant professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, is currently under contract for a new book titled “Suspended Critique: The Sense of Freedom in Free Improvisation.” It will be published by Oxford University Press. The book will appear in the Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound book series, edited by Gavin Steingo (Princeton) and Jairo Moreno (UPenn). Drawing on several years of fieldwork in Berlin, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area, it argues that (musical) free improvisation constitutes a social practice driven by the notion that participants experience greater freedom in the absence of criticism and evaluative discourse. Among other issues, several chapters of the book focus on the experimental ethnographic method Banerji developed, in which he asks improvisers to critique an artificially intelligent improviser he designed based on his fieldwork.