This study explores the deep historical roots of algorithmic thinking in music, demonstrating that the design and embedding of algorithms into musical tools predate the eras of computers and artificial intelligence. Across examples ranging from ancient automata to nineteenth-century mechanical musical devices, artisans and musicians constructed mechanisms that embodied musical rules in physical form, thereby formalising processes of repetition, variation and autonomy. By revisiting these historical traditions and examining how past societies conceptualised musical machines, this study provides a historical perspective on recurring issues such as agency, authorship, autonomy and human–machine mediation. Methodologically, the study combines a media-archaeological analysis of historical automata with conceptual inquiry into instrument design, linking pre-digital ‘material algorithms’ to contemporary intelligent instruments. It examines how the physical embedding of algorithmic procedures has shaped perceptions of musical agency and authorship, while also considering how these historical cases can inform, rather than prescribe, discussions of contemporary AI- and data-driven instruments. In doing so, the study identifies selected continuities and discontinuities between historical musical automata and current algorithmic practices, offering a historically grounded framework for understanding intelligent instruments in the post-digital era.

The development of computing in Brazil followed a peculiar path, shaping cultural production since the earliest encounters between artists and technology. Beginning in the 1960s, musicians and computer scientists made initial attempts to use computers for artistic purposes, at a time when it was still possible to keep pace with developments in Computer Music in North America and Europe. However, restricted access to foreign technologies and the political context following the 1964 military coup—two deeply interrelated factors—made it unfeasible to establish a national system capable of sustaining continuous production in Music & Computing before the early 1990s. Such development would have required both strong institutional support and freedom of artistic expression, conditions that were not present. This article traces these trajectories through key artistic experiments and public policies related to computing. Rather than offering a comprehensive catalogue, it presents a transversal perspective that highlights the relationship between the formation of the Computer Music field and state policies up to the mid-1980s. By interweaving these parallel narratives—linking cultural practices and political frameworks—the study sheds light on how computer-mediated artistic production contributed to the constitution of Electronic Music in Brazil.

This paper re-evaluates the significance of José Vicente Asuar (1933–2017), a pioneering figure in Latin American computer music, shifting the focus from the hardware construction of his COMDASUAR system to the innovative software he developed for algorithmic composition. While Asuar’s hybrid digital-analog computer is noteworthy, the true core of his contribution lies in his original machine language programs designed for the Intel 8080 microprocessor. This study examines how Asuar thought about and designed algorithms specifically created for generating musical structures, processing symbolic data in real-time, and enabling interactive performance. By analyzing newly discovered handwritten notebooks containing his meticulous code documentation, we uncover Asuar’s deep engagement with low-level programming to express complex musical ideas. His approach, focused on the computer as an “amplifier of the imagination,” prioritized the development of software to facilitate generative composition and real-time manipulation of musical parameters. This paper argues that Asuar’s legacy rests not solely on the COMDASUAR hardware but primarily on his visionary software architecture, which transformed the computer into a dynamic compositional partner. In doing so, he anticipated later developments in interactive music systems, demonstrating a pioneering approach to computer music that placed software innovation at its center.

This article examines the use of neural networks in electromechanical sound art and music, where sound is materially enacted through physical means such as motors, solenoids, and physical resonators. It begins with a survey of documented works, outlining a range of current strategies and discussing how technical, material, and performative factors influence their design. Identifying natural language processing as underexplored in this domain, a practice-based case study, Seven Studies for Electric Motors, develops one such language-based approach. The project embeds a small language model for real-time sentence generation, extracts syntax structures, and translates these into patterns of motor-driven sound. Taken together, the survey and case study offer a picture of how machine learning has been integrated into electromechanical practices over the past decade and point to possible directions for further work.

Technological advancements have historically reshaped how music was produced and distributed, causing disruptions while offering new opportunities. Although generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can be seen as an extension of this paradigm, its current commercial implementation poses a unique series of challenges. Using machine learning, commercial GenAI platforms turn millions of musical recordings into statistical distributions and generate new outputs from learned patterns. This article analyses the sociocultural and socioeconomic implications of this disruption. Engaging Walter Benjamin’s analysis of mechanical reproduction, Christopher Small’s concept of musicking and Jacques Attali’s theory of music’s prophetic function, we examine how this process reconfigures the conditions under which music operates as a social and political practice. We further analyse the political economy of AI, drawing on frameworks of extraction, technofeudalism and the displacement of musical labour. We argue that current trajectories are not intrinsic to the technology itself but to commercial imperatives and, through practice-based research, showcase interventionist approaches that contest the conditions commercial GenAI platforms have created. As GenAI increasingly mediates cultural production, the contest over music’s social function prefigures wider struggles over creativity, labour and democratic participation.

This paper examines Summermood (1981), an electroacoustic work composed by Antonio Russek for bass flute and live electronics, situating it within the Mexican electroacoustic scene of the 1980s and in dialogue with international developments in live electronic performance. A pivotal work in both Russek’s career and flutist Marielena Arizpe’s repertoire, Summermood, stands among the earliest Mexican compositions for electronically modified acoustic instruments. It has not been able to be studied or performed due to the absence of published documentation, its dependence on the obsolete DeltaLab DL-4 digital delay unit, and its original association with Arizpe, who retired early following an accident-related injury. Drawing on archival documents, interviews, recordings and the graphic score and Russek’s notes, this paper analyses the work’s aesthetic conception, its integration of extended flute timbres with electronic processing, its graphic notation and the collaborative practices that informed its creation, arguing for its significance in the historiography of Mexican electroacoustic music. While briefly acknowledging the preservation challenges posed by obsolete technologies, the central aim of this paper is to reassemble Summermood as a case study that illuminates Mexico’s underexplored contribution to the global avant-garde of the late twentieth century.

Data-embedded instruments that couple sensing, modelling and sound production are increasingly used in electroacoustic practice, yet their ethical and cultural configurations remain under-analysed. This article develops an ethical-embodied framework for examining how particular data, sensing and mapping arrangements configure relations of care, listening and musical agency. Drawing on feminist and decolonial listening practices, disability and critical data studies and accounts of embodied instrumentality, it combines a selective genealogy of electroacoustic and globally situated practices with a mid-level comparative lens that treats its technical axes as heuristic rather than taxonomic. Case vignettes analyse works using gesture tracking, electromyography (EMG) and brain–computer interfaces (BCI), audience-sensing installations and machine-learning vocal systems, alongside the author’s own data-embedded instrument. Across these examples, the analysis shows how similar technologies can reproduce or contest institutional surveillance, extractivism and aesthetic normativity and outlines implications for the design, evaluation and teaching of data-mediated musical systems foregrounding situated listening and collective accountability.

This article examines the most renowned electroacoustic music festival in Chile so far, from its first edition in 2001 to 2012, when its continuity was interrupted. It focuses on two aspects that appeared relevant and took place consistently during the period under study: (1) the generation of networks, circulations and aesthetic crossovers that were favoured by the festival; and (2) the perspective of the electroacoustic concert as a space for research and experimentation in devices and formats deemed appropriate for a particular experience of music. To this end, primary and archival sources of the article’s author as well as other direct participants in the festival’s organisation were reviewed. Based on this, the relevance of these types of activities in the dissemination of these art forms is determined, as well as the need for proper management to grow and consolidate these spaces.

The Laboratorio Digital de Música (LADIM), or Digital Music Laboratory, is located at the heart of Universidad Simón Bolívar as part of several other experimental laboratories (e.g., computational mechanics, cellular biology or nuclear physics). It has played a leading role in the curation and performance of electroacoustic and technology-mediated music at the most prestigious international festivals of contemporary music held in Venezuela (such as the Latin American Music Festival 2004–2016, and Atempo 2006). Furthermore, it has organised independent concerts and events, trained composers and musicians, produced a discreet body of literature and collaborated with institutions like the Society of Electroacoustic Music in Sweden (SEAMS) and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, Stanford). Throughout its 21-year history, LADIM has been a central figure shaping the contemporary music landscape of Venezuela’s 21st-century scene. Despite its repertoire amounting to 75 electroacoustic works, encompassing acousmatic, mixed, video and live-electronics pieces, the laboratory has not yet established a formal archive. This article represents the first effort to reconstruct its historical milestones, while identifying the repertoire collection linked to it for the purpose of a future systematic study.

This paper examines how aesthetics are constructed in technology-mediated musical practice, focusing on the interplay between cultural expectations of AI-generated sounds and the technical structures determining the behaviour of AI algorithms. Through a reconstruction of events in the Surfing Hyperparameters project, we capture how the sonic aesthetics of the system were constructed by negotiating between our sonic expectations (informed by cultural narratives of ghosts in machines) and the sound produced by the system. We argue that the aesthetics of AI-generated sound are often inspired rather than directly caused by the technology itself. While existing research has identified how tools embed ‘paths of least resistance’ towards certain sonic aesthetics, our work reveals a complementary force: how aesthetic expectations rooted in cultural narratives – from science fiction’s stories of autonomous machines to sonic hauntology’s spectral presences – actively shape design decisions and sonic outcomes. Through a radically transparent approach to documenting mismatches between expectation and reality, we show that the stories practitioners tell while building and making music with technology are performative, constructing rather than merely describing aesthetic realities. Addressing these interplays between imagination, expectation and material reality constitutes an important step towards addressing the complex sociotechnical assemblages in which technology-mediated musical practices come into being.

This article presents the recent production and institutional trajectory of Studio PANaroma, one of the leading centres for research and creation in electroacoustic music in Latin America. Over the course of three decades, PANaroma has functioned not only as a multichannel electroacoustic music studio, but also as a pedagogical hub – nurturing new generations of composers through a coherent artistic vision embedded within Brazil’s public university system. This article discusses the studio’s aesthetic orientation and artistic values, as well as the collaborative research strategies currently being developed within SOMNIUM, its newly established research group. Two case studies are presented. The first stems from a recently concluded six-year Thematic Project entitled Harmonicity and Inharmonicity in Instruments of the Percussion/Resonance Family in Interaction with Electronics (2019–2025). This research investigated how the harmonic and inharmonic spectra of percussion instruments can inform both compositional strategies and analytical methodologies. The second case outlines a new line of inquiry still in its early stages, currently in the process of project design and preliminary research. This investigation introduces the concept of Sonoclisis – a neologism coined to describe the acoustic phenomena resulting from the physical coupling of sounding bodies – exploring its implications for both sound-based composition and analysis.

The text explores ‘Black Box Music,’ an artistic research experiment investigating human–technology relations in musical improvisation. The authors describe performances in which each musician plays an unfamiliar, complex, custom-built instrument designed by another team member. These ‘black box’ devices – ranging from AI-based systems to assemblages of analogue devices – cannot be fully understood or controlled, thus foregrounding questions of agency, sense-making, and aesthetic experience. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, phenomenology, and philosophies of technology, the authors show how performers, instruments, and audience form a dynamic network of actants whose roles and intentions remain ambiguous. Players initially struggle to ‘read’ the instruments’ behaviour, shifting from reactive analysis toward proactive improvisation. This process blurs embodiment and alterity: the instruments alternately function as transparent extensions of the body and as quasi-autonomous others. Such ambiguity invites anthropomorphisation and even ritualised interaction, echoing historical entanglements of music, magic, and spirituality. Audience members, too, encounter indeterminate agency and must negotiate aesthetic meaning without clear attribution of sound to human or machine. The project demonstrates how complexity and unpredictability destabilise traditional notions of control, revealing improvisation as collective, participatory sense-making and highlighting the emergent, co-creative agency of both humans and technological instruments.

This article explores the role of Chilean electroacoustic music as a medium for articulating cultural memory, particularly in response to significant historical events and unresolved traumas of the past 50 years. It examines five relevant works by Iván Pequeño (*1945), Leni Alexander (1924–2005), Federico Schumacher (*1963), José Miguel Candela (*1968) and Rodrigo Cádiz (*1972), analysing their engagement with voice, historical memory, trauma and political testimony through the lenses of acousmatic theory, sonic phenomenology and trauma studies. The article argues that Chilean electroacoustic music serves not only as a record of historical violence but also as a performative space where memory can be inhabited, archived, transformed and made audible again. It highlights the use of human voice recordings as vehicles of memory, the integration of radio art and testimonial narratives and the concept of ‘acousmatic storytelling’ to engage listeners in a multi-valent listening experience that blurs the lines between abstract sound and historical index. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how Chilean electroacoustic music functions as ‘embodied historiography’, using sound to write history and engaging listeners’ imagination, cognition and empathy to embrace through sound experiences of memory, political statements and justice.

In this article, Composing for Acoustic Robots (COMACROB) serves as a case study on the posthuman ontology of digital instruments. COMACROB is an instrumental system composed of live coding, AI-generated symbolic music and mechanically actuated acoustic instruments, such as the Yamaha Disklavier and MIDI pipe organ. The system challenges traditional distinctions between instrument, scoring and performance. The study borrows key notions from Thor Magnusson’s organology theory, presenting COMACROB as a layered system of inscriptions. It then attempts to delineate COMACROB’s speculative realism, drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as two complementary theoretical frameworks. ANT is employed to present how agency in COMACROB is distributed across a network of translating actions between human and nonhuman agents, whereas OOO places the focus of inquiry on the autonomy and resistance of the objects that constitute the system. At the core of the study lies the notion that algorithmic processes are not external control agents, but intrinsic functions that co-constitute the identity of the instrument. The article overall posits that COMACROB is a case of posthuman model of musical organology, according to which digital instruments are participant agents in the process of music authorship.

Interest is growing in how relational ontologies and more-than-human design methodologies – so-called ‘entanglement’ theories – might inform digital music research. To what extent does the growing popularity of such theories portend a change in technical or musical practices versus putting new gloss on long-standing ideas? Can or should entanglement theories be distilled into concrete design frameworks? This paper starts from the opposite premise: rather than offering an unambiguous roadmap for designers, entanglement theories are at their most powerful in destabilising ideas and worldviews that have become so ingrained as to become invisible. In digital musical instrument (DMI) design, this barely visible infrastructure consists partly of an ecosystem of stable, context-agnostic concepts about music: analytical descriptors such as notes, pitches, onsets and gestures which get inverted into the building blocks of sound-producing technical systems. However, design is not as simple as inverted analysis. This paper argues that treating familiar musical concepts as authoritative is responsible for several long-standing conundrums facing DMI research. The paper juxtaposes ideas from entanglement literature with brief vignettes concerning instruments new and old, arguing that musical instruments enact the very concepts they take as pre-existing, and that everything about musical discourse and practice should remain up for grabs.

This article investigates identity formation among contemporary South American electroacoustic music composers through the lens of place, territory and socio-political context. Drawing on interviews with 27 composers from across the continent, the study explores how artistic practices are shaped by affective ties to geography, histories of colonialism, academic migration and technology. The analysis highlights five intersecting identity factors: mestizaje and cultural hybridity, decolonial thinking, political activism through sound composition, the tension between belonging and displacement in artistic mobility and the workaround aesthetic rooted in limited resources. Rather than portraying scarcity as a limitation, composers often embrace it as a creative force that fosters innovation and local specificity. The findings suggest that electroacoustic music in South America reflects not only a diversity of individual trajectories but also shared cultural dynamics that distinguish the region’s creative processes. These insights contribute to broader discussions on decolonisation, identity and the global circulation of music technologies.

This article introduces a method to personalise the behaviour of a music co-improvisation system using a genetic algorithm that iteratively identifies optimal configurations governing the system’s behaviour according to a musician’s aesthetic objectives, using a corpus of annotated co-performances. The corpus annotations represent the decisions the semi-autonomous system should learn to make in different musical contexts, reflecting the musicians’ styles, ideas and aesthetic preferences. We apply this approach to personalise the multi-agent autonomous looper (MAAL), a co-improvisation system that autonomously samples and loops segments of an improvised performance by integrating machine listening with a rule-based framework. After detailing the design of the evolutionary search algorithm, we present the results of a study involving five expert improvising musicians. These musicians applied the proposed method to personalise the MAAL and co-improvised with it. We assessed the extent to which the MAAL’s behaviour, adapted to their personalised data, aligned with their individual aesthetic preferences. Findings show that automating the functions of sampling and layering loops seems to invite explorative and responsive creativity and that personalisation can facilitate co-adaptation between musicians and artificial agents by establishing a defined aesthetic vocabulary of co-creative behaviours.

All around Santiago, Chile, there are water towers known to citizens as Copas de Agua. These towers are recognised as modern industrial heritage and integral landmarks within the city’s urban landscape, contributing significantly to its cultural identity. This article presents strategies for exploring aural architecture by creating a new space defined by sound in motion within an existing architectural structure with unique morphological and acoustic characteristics through the medium of sound installation art. The project Polyphono, a multichannel sound installation located within the Copa de Agua of Quinta Bella, Chile, establishes a dialogue between three different spaces: the invisible space of the sound installation, the existing space of the water tower and the symbolic space of experience. In this process, an interior space of sound emerges within the physical space of acoustic reactions, which is experienced by the audience as aural architecture. This dynamic situation involves animating the monumentality of the water tower, transforming it through the performative action of the sound installation, thereby intensifying the historical significance of the site in physical, sensory, political and social terms. The outcomes are framed as a transitional space, from site-specific sound to aural architecture, creating an affective space for aesthetic experience.