Since the late 1950s, Latin America has sustained a heterogeneous and critically engaged tradition in electroacoustic music, computer music and sound-based artistic research from early experiments with magnetic tape and analogue electronics to contemporary practices involving computation, networks and experimental luthiery, artists and researchers across the region have developed distinctive approaches to sound organisation and listening. These practices have generated a substantial and diverse corpus of works and research, encompassing a wide range of aesthetics and objectives where one may find, in one way or another, the fusion between the musical and sound expressions of each country and region of the continent, the connection to many political, social and historical subjects, the problem of the identity, the search for own resources and methodologies as well as the reflection on the situated character of the listening and a great heritage of sound and musicological investigations which focuses on historical, sociological and cultural questions from the region. All these practices have been shaped not only by aesthetic enquiry, but also by specific historical and political conditions and contexts, including uneven access to technological resources, periods of authoritarian rule that often led to the destruction of new institutional or independent spaces, periods of economic crisis of varying intensity and, as a consequence, the recurring need to invent local infrastructures for artistic creation and research.
Over recent decades, particularly following the consolidation of democratic processes in most of the countries of the region, this field has been further consolidated through the emergence of specialised centres, laboratories and academic programmes. Institutions such as the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (CMMAS) and the Master’s programme in Art and Sound Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), among others, exemplify sustained regional efforts to articulate sound practices as sites of research, pedagogy and cultural production. This gave birth to a rich artistic and academic exchange within the region that can be found, in the case of these two institutions, in the different research, publications, symposiums, festivals and/or their discographical editions, activities that are systematically documented and archived in their respective websitesFootnote 1 .
Despite this richness, the circulation of knowledge between Spanish- and English-speaking contexts remains markedly asymmetrical. This exchange of productions conceived and written in Spanish generally takes place among Latin Americans themselves. While scholarship in Spanish frequently engages with Anglophone literature, the inverse is far less common. As a result, Latin American sound practices are often marginalised, reframed through external narratives or, in the worst scenario, completely ignored. This special issue of Organised Sound addresses this imbalance by presenting contributions in English that invite us to foster a more reciprocal and situated dialogue, which intends to open new points of view with the intention of not only creating a greater knowledge of a part of the activities produced in Latin America, but also with the goal of creating new networks and expanding existing ones.
The issue opens by revisiting historical and institutional foundations, challenging linear or centre–periphery narratives of technological development. Damião reconstructs the early history of computer music in Brazil, foregrounding local scientific networks and practices of technological improvisation. Schumacher, Parra and Cádiz examine José Vicente Asuar’s COMDASUAR system in Chile, revealing alternative genealogies of musical computation that developed independently of dominant centres. Historical engagement also takes the form of reactivation: Dodero Carrillo, Díaz de Cossio Sánchez and Hyrkas demonstrate how revisiting Mexico’s electroacoustic legacy through contemporary performance practices can reinscribe historical works within embodied, present-day contexts.
Institutional resilience and self-organisation emerge as central concerns in several contributions. The history of the Ai-Maako festival in Chile is examined as a crucial platform for experimental music, sustained through collective effort and artistic commitment by Schumacher. Similarly, Quintero Gómez and Morales discuss the trajectory of LADIM in Venezuela foregrounding the laboratory as a site of resistance, memory and knowledge production under conditions of political and economic instability. Buck and Arima focus on the Studio PANaroma, based in Sao Paolo, Brazil, not only from a historical perspective but also discussing research strategies which are currently being developed.
Questions of memory, identity and listening occupy a significant place within the issue. Cádiz, Fugellie and Eisner Sagues explore electroacoustic works as sites of collective memory in post-dictatorship contexts, while Martínez Álvarez, de Almeida Ribeiro and Thomasi conceptualise identity not as a fixed stylistic marker but as a relational process articulated through listening. These concerns are further developed through spatial and political perspectives: Balbontín investigates aural architectures in site-specific sound practices, and Azevedo Costa Neto, Olivier Schaub and Mortensen Wanderley address the ethical dimensions of environmental sound art.
The issue also engages with contemporary and emerging practices shaped by digital and networked environments. Cortés García examines how Latin American artists responded to the pandemic through experimentation with metaverse platforms, while García Castilla challenges deterministic views of technology by subverting algorithms within collaborative networks. Education appears as a transformative field in the work of López Ramírez Gastón, who advocates for open science within Peruvian music education. The issue concludes with Ryan and Ruiz’s proposal of the concept of the ‘electromagnetic soundwalk’ as an anti-method for revealing hidden infrastructures of consumption and control, and by addressing questions of transnational belonging in Azizol’s work and by reimagining instrument-making as an embodied, postcolonial mode of knowledge production in Turan’s study of experimental luthiery.
The authors included in this volume make valuable contributions to collective thinking and contribute to the circulation and knowledge of research, reflections and their own realities. Taken together, these articles demonstrate that Latin American electroacoustic music and sound art are neither peripheral nor derivative. Rather, they articulate situated epistemologies that challenge dominant narratives of technological progress. By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, this issue proposes listening itself – as an aesthetic practice, a political gesture and an epistemological stance – as a basis for a more equitable exchange of sonic knowledge.
