This essay explores how the musical practices of four contemporary Latin American sound artists – Mar Alzamora, Pablo Bas, Ana Rodriguez and Eufrasio Prates – engage with ecological crises and socio-environmental issues. Focusing on the region’s biodiversity and colonial histories, we combined a critical literature review with the analysis of works involving soundwalks, electroacoustic compositions, free improvisation and real-time synthesis. These practices incorporate environmental sound, oral memory and situated listening to construct eco-sonic narratives critical of colonial legacies. Rather than aiming to highlight artistic innovation, the essay investigates how these works contribute to an expanded understanding of Latin American sound/landscapes within environmental sound art. Through the examination of aesthetic, technological and political strategies, we identified principles such as relational listening, spatial immersion and collective creation as central to these practices. Our findings contribute to discussions on art as a mode of knowledge, showing how sonic approaches can question dominant narratives, reshape perceptions of place and foster ecological awareness.

This article examines how algorithms are embedded in contemporary instrumental and electroacoustic practice, focusing on orchestration tools and AI-improvisation environments such as Orchidea and Somax2. Its central claim is that artificial intelligence in these systems extends spectralist compositional tendencies into new computational and performative contexts. Historically, instrumental resynthesis recreated analysed spectra through vocal-instrumental, or electronic means; today, AI-based frameworks broaden this logic, opening new aesthetics and modes of interaction. In both systems, spectral analysis underpins the segmentation, combination and transformation of sound within corpus-based synthesis. Orchidea maps spectral targets onto instrumental resources through forecasting and optimisation, enabling new approaches to orchestral design. Somax2 navigates its corpus in real time through multi-agent interaction with human performers, reframing improvisation as a dynamic feedback loop.

This article examines Kinesthesis 2.0, an interactive system that transforms gesture and facial expression into real-time vocal processing through algorithmic integration. Drawing on over two decades of compositional practice for theatre, dance and film, we analyse how machine learning, gesture recognition and audio processing configure player–instrument–algorithm assemblages. The analysis is grounded in vocal embodiment rather than in the voice as a discrete signal: vocal sound emerges through knowledge cultivated in sustained practice, which the system extends through gestural control and algorithmic mediation. Case studies from three theatrical productions, including human–AI co-improvisation with Somax2, examine how algorithmic systems reconfigure performer agency and embodied experience while revealing productive tensions between human expressivity and computational interpretation. The methodology is qualitative and practice-based, combining technical analysis, structured performer observation and artistic reflection; observations derive from sustained artistic practice rather than controlled experimentation. The research contributes to ongoing discussions in electroacoustic and embodied performance practice by proposing that computational mediation becomes experientially seamless not through technical simplification but through cultural depth: rooting algorithmic gesture vocabularies in embedded cultural tradition allows performers to internalise the system as an extension of practice rather than as an external tool.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Latin American artists turned low-cost, open platforms such as Mozilla Hubs, Twitch, Jitsi, YouTube and OBS into ephemeral infrastructures for collaborative VR concerts, 3D live-coding sessions, collective streaming events and networked Algoraves. Drawing on participant observation, event documentation and informal interviews, this article examines these cases with a focus on La Fábrica VR (TOPLAP México) and related experiences in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Argentina and Costa Rica. We argue that these practices materialise a situated, collaborative and tactically informal technological production that reconfigures agency, embodiment and listening in immersive environments.

This article examines what happens when emotional-inference algorithms are embedded as compositional tools within live performance systems rather than deployed as external classifiers. Through analysis of the Transmodal Emotional Amplification Listener (TEAL), a real-time multimodal system developed by the author for two performance works, it demonstrates how embedding transforms algorithmic function from recognition to composition. TEAL employs nested analysis windows that track interval statistics across multiple time scales, assigns composer-defined emotional parameters to these patterns and fuses them with gestural energy data extracted via MediaPipe. The composite signal passes through a locally hosted language model that generates narrative text, the Synthetic Dream. A secondary interpreter reverses the emotional parameters into MIDI and the Synthetic Dream into visual prompts, closing a bidirectional compositional loop in which the system’s generated notes are played back acoustically on a Yamaha Disklavier grand piano alongside the performer. The article introduces emotional sovereignty, defined as the performer’s right to define the affective ground on which algorithms operate, as a design principle for embedded affective systems. Drawing on music emotion recognition, interactive systems research and cybernetic art, it argues that bespoke compositional embedding offers a viable alternative to universal emotion recognition.

This article addresses sonic experimentalism in Latin America from a critical perspective based on a review of artistic projects that have been active in recent years in different countries of the region. Its main objective is to discuss whether there are features that can be conceived as characteristic of Latin American sonic experimentalism, whether it is relevant to define issues that affect the people and communities that practice it in a cross-cutting manner, and, if so, whether it is feasible to talk about strategies that bring together people and groups who, although they work in different countries and conditions, consider themselves as part of the same community. Through the three axes chosen to structure this article (sonority, technology, and collaborative platforms), several aspects will be addressed that link a significant number of sound and experimental music artists in different locations within the territory in question. This will lead to a discussion about identity expressed in sound practices, using a cultural studies approach. By foregrounding voices that “ruin the algorithm” of coloniality, this research enriches Latin American sound studies debates and seeks to contribute to the study of experimentalism in the Global South.

This article explores an initiative aimed at fostering a culture of electronic music and sound arts in Peru, focusing on the Open Science project, Circuito Abierto (2022–2024). It explores how Circuito Abierto, an annual artistic residency rooted in Open Science culture and organised by the Laboratorio de Música Electroacústica y Arte Sonoro at the Universidad Nacional de Música (UNM, formerly the Conservatorio Nacional de Música), challenged traditional and conservative educational structures within Peru’s academic landscape. The project promoted an open, collaborative approach to music creation, aimed at bridging the gap between academic and popular music scenes in the education of electronic music. Circuito Abierto may serve as a case study for addressing broader historical challenges in Peruvian music education, particularly with regard to music technology and experimental electronic sound art practices.

In a non-generative approach to artificial intelligence in an artistic practice, this work looks at mapping processing data from artificial neural networks (NNs) onto sound and visuals. One aim of this practice-based piece of research is to paradoxically offer insights into how these ubiquitous, yet notoriously opaque algorithms operate, by exposing the audience to the intrinsic unintelligibility of their processes. The other is to use these vast amounts of abstract data as a creative starting point for audiovisual artworks, referring to aesthetic traditions that have emerged from the need to make use and potentially make sense of such extensive masses of information, and from ones that have developed sounds that have gradually become associated with digital and post-digital worlds and other exterior and abstract concepts. At the heart of the whole work is a link and cross-fertilisation between the use of sounds and visuals aesthetically associated with errors and digital malfunction and the use of actual ‘waste’ data (from NN training), which acts as a trace of their operation.

This article argues that performance practice can render the operational strategies of otherwise opaque commercial algorithms perceptible. It presents ‘Concrete Reel,’ a research-creation project that operates on Instagram, transforming doomscrolling into a radical audiovisual improvisation. Framed by Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory and Karen Barad’s agential realism, the performance is conceived as a dynamic ecosystem wherein the algorithm is a non-human actant whose nature emerges through its resistance to provocation. The model articulates the interaction among the performer, the algorithm and the audience as a triadic negotiation that unfolds in three configurations of increasing scale (micro, meso, macro). At the core of this interaction is a particular performance protocol: a system of binary rules that exaggerates the platform’s interactive logic to deconstruct its user-centric narrative. The audience’s intervention is designed to induce a crisis in the protocol. The resulting collapse of the protocol’s binary logic reveals how the user-centric narrative forecloses agency. From the rubble of control, a deeper understanding emerges, reframing interaction with the algorithm not as domination, but as a conscious navigation of systemic complexity.

This article proposes the electromagnetic soundwalk as an anti-method for consumer research, a compositional practice that listens to the infrastructural residue of market environments without aiming to interpret, represent or explain. Using a handheld electromagnetic detector, the walk transposes imperceptible emissions into audible frequencies, revealing the operational murmur of retail systems. These include devices such as wireless payment systems, contactless terminals, touch-screen tablets and digital signage, technologies that organise and condition consumer experience, but do so silently, beneath the threshold of ordinary perception. These electromagnetic emissions trace the infrastructures that shape and facilitate consumption yet remain formally outside marketing discourse. The soundwalk stages a form of methodological estrangement, where listening becomes a way of staying with systems that persist without expressive form. While rooted in soundwalking traditions, the project diverges from immersion or participation. Positioned within the sonic turn in consumer research, the paper reframes sound as residue, an ambient trace of logistical systems. For marketing, this is a speculative proposition. For sound studies, it is an example of compositional listening used to breach an adjacent field. What results is not a soundwalk for its own sake, but an acoustic method for hearing how consumer systems continue, quietly and without reward. The first section of the paper adopts a speculative and affective tone, free of citation, to evoke the experiential register of the method. Subsequent sections develop the theoretical and methodological foundations in a more conventional academic voice.

Bayu Nokturnal II is an electroacoustic soundscape composition commissioned by the Borneo Ensemble in 2024, developed as a reimagining of Seed of Life 4: Rest and Shelters, a binaural fixed-media work composed in 2021. Rooted in the ecological and cultural identity of Gua Tempurung, a limestone cave in Perak, Malaysia, the piece explores how the interplay of acoustic instruments and environmental field recordings evokes a sense of place, space and belonging. Inspired by Chris Watson’s El Tren Fantasma, the work expands from fixed media into a live, spatialised dialogue with geophonic and biophonic elements. This paper positions Bayu Nokturnal II within the evolving discourse of ecocomposition, a practice shaped by environmental awareness and sonic interactivity. It draws on Matthew Burtner’s Syntax of Snow and Hildegard Westerkamp’s Fantasie for Horns II. These works foreground the role of soundscape as an active compositional agent. Bayu Nokturnal II employs an aural-feedback score using grid-cell timing, Scientific Pitch Notation and gesture-based instructions to foster real-time responsiveness to the soundscape. This strategy replaces conventional metre with listening-driven interaction. The result is a Malaysian site-specific composition contributing to global dialogues in acoustic ecology, environmental music and performative listening.

Concepts such as agency, autonomy and collaboration are often used by artists to frame relationships in more-than-human sonic practices, from works engaging animal sounds and environments to those involving algorithms. Because these terms carry divergent meanings in biology, computer science and cultural theory, they become fragile when invoked literally in sonic arts. This paper proposes approaching such framing as ludic: creative, explicitly non-ontological and a significant part of the process of making a work. It develops this position in three stages, examining historical more-than-human sonic art involving multiple species before moving from interspecies practices to those involving algorithms, then contextualising these discussions through a reflection on the author’s own practice. Approaching relational framing as ludic rather than literal can generate richer meaning and experience for both artists and audiences. Further, this removes the burden of proving or disproving agency or autonomy and instead opens space for more nuanced, playful and complex possibilities in how algorithmic instruments are conceptualised, designed and performed.

Embedding formalised procedures into music – whether through mathematical, semantic or even gamified approaches – has been a well-documented practice since the first half of the 20th century. Many such practices have since fallen under the collective moniker of ‘algorithmic composition’, which encompasses an array of rules-based approaches to music and sonic arts. Nevertheless, there is a realm of algorithmic composition that is often overlooked; musical practices that interact with the more-than-human world often contain innate algorithmic properties. Such properties, however, subvert orthodox categorisations in that their axioms are not of human origin. In other words, music created in conversation with the natural world will often acquire algorithmic properties from the natural world. This article questions whether a phenomenological distinction should be made for algorithmic properties such as these, arguing that their distinction within algorithmic composition is theoretically and ethically sound. The neologism, vibrant algorithm, is proposed as a blanket term for this practice, and its operational features are defined. In doing so, several diverse musical examples are discussed, prompting further ethical queries both within and beyond music about the sentience and agency of the living environment – including entities that have not been conventionally regarded as animate by Westernised and urbanised worldviews.

In this article, I examine how I embed algorithms in instrumental and electroacoustic compositional practices to organise numerical data drawn from extra-musical environmental and cosmological contexts within musical materials and structures. I explore such material-semiotic exchanges between music and surrounding environments to sonically reconfigure the matter of the life stories suggested by Ursula Le Guin, stories that challenge anthropocentric narratives. The aim of telling life stories aurally is to both explore Baradian new materialist feminist deployments of technologies and encourage conversations and reflections on the forms, causes and effects of the relationship between humanity and its environments as proposed by Donna Haraway. Through the integration of environmental and astronomical data into musical materials and structures, real-time sound processing, octophonic spatialisation and generative interactions, the works I composed and discuss in this article unravel the sonic textures of the displacement of vegetal species across the Earth, the formation of galaxies, the physical dynamics of bird flight and the pollution of the seas, creating meaningful intersections of different media to examine how sonic practices developed within hypermedial settings may narrate more-than-human processes.

This study investigates experimental luthiery and sound art practices in Latin America through the lenses of postcolonial theory and acoustemology. Within this framework, the musical instrument is conceptualised as a sound-producing object and an active site of cultural representation, historical memory and resistance. These practices, diverging from conventional luthiery traditions, embrace collective, conceptual and material-based modes of production, establishing alternative knowledge systems through sound. Drawing on the works of artists, such as Walter Smetak, Marco Antônio Guimarães, Joaquín Orellana, Wilson Sukorski and Tania Candiani, this study explores how sound mediates relationships with space, the body, memory and technology. Conceptual instrument design is thereby positioned as an aesthetic-political tool developed in parallel with transformations in auditory regimes and responding to epistemic inequalities. This study also focuses on modes of production shaped by technological exclusion, gender and postcolonial identity formation. Experimental luthiery in Latin America is presented as a field of artistic expression and a multilayered epistemic site for the generation of alternative knowledge systems, political subjectivities and spatial justice strategies.

The development of electroacoustic music in China over the past four decades has been shaped not only by the nation’s modernisation strategies but also by the interplay of historical contexts, temporal frameworks and cultural connotations. While certain achievements have been made in the current phase, the entrenched dualistic framework of ‘China versus the West’ and a lack of critical inquiry fundamentally constrain the potential for further advancement in China’s electroacoustic music. Positioning ‘Chineseness’ as a central strategy in electroacoustic music composition has proven effective in specific historical contexts. However, with the evolution of the times, this strategy requires re-examination and reassessment within contemporary contexts. This paper seeks to trace the developmental trajectory of electroacoustic music in China and analyse existing academic research to identify and unpack its deeper, underlying issues. By introducing a broader ecological perspective, the paper aims to transcend the rigid, dichotomous framework dominated by Chinese-Western dualism, deconstruct cultural essentialism and critically reassess the positioning of Chinese electroacoustic music within these constructs. Finally, it will explore the potential possibilities and responses of an ecological perspective in practice, based on a selection of compositional practices, including my own work Mixobloodify.

This text addresses the materiality of radio art, situating it within the theoretical frameworks of contemporary research on new materialism as well as the materiality of media and sound. The analysis employs perspectives from Christoph Cox’s sonic materialism and approaches by such writers as Salomé Voegelin, Gregory Whitehead, Allen S. Weiss and Margaret Hall, who emphasise the ontological autonomy of sound and its impact on space and listeners. A critical close reading of the relevant literature is conducted with regard to its applicability to radio art. The article analyses radio art practices structurally and phenomenologically across composition, reception, materiality and technology, aligning with practice-informed media analysis. The author’s aim is to outline and systematise diverse theoretical approaches and frameworks that capture the materiality of radio being, as well as to reveal the ways in which the radio medium co-creates artistic sound reality. The results of the literature and artistic practice analysis highlight the significance of sound’s materiality and its relational character, indicating that sound does not exist in isolation but in interaction with the environment, technology and listener. Consequently, seven dimensions of radio art materiality are delineated, which integrate existing concepts and provide a comprehensive perspective on radio artistic works.

This article presents and discusses a table of audiovisual transformations based on practice-based experience. The transformations were designed to reinforce the link between sound and object by considering what a particular audio process would look like if translated into visual form. The creative work involves installations that focus on objects integrated with projection mapping and electroacoustic sound. Examples of other artists who create object-based works are introduced, followed by a discussion around how electroacoustic music can influence audiovisual approaches. Screen and installation-based audiovisual theory expands on this and links to a two-part table of transformation strategies. The first part of the table describes process-based links that were created to imagine how certain electroacoustic studio techniques would translate to alter visual material. The second part describes broader conceptual links between audio and visual elements. The findings offer an insight into how electroacoustic practice can inform audiovisual composition choices. Whilst the intended use was for sound installations, there is significant scope for others to adopt and adapt the transformation strategies beyond this, including visual artists who wish to work with sound and those seeking to further theorise audiovisual relationships in a variety of settings.

Recent developments in spatial audio and immersive technologies have expanded creative possibilities for composers and sound artists. This article presents a novel prototype of a spherical microphone with an ellipsoid casing and ten motorised condenser capsules, each capable of real-time adjustment of orientation and polar pattern. Unlike fixed-pattern or conventional ambisonic arrays, this design enables dynamic control over spatial coverage and directivity, offering new opportunities for multichannel recording, live performance and interactive sound art. While software-based spatialisation offers some flexibility, physical reconfiguration of capsules provides superior responsiveness and avoids latency, phase artefacts or resolution loss. This is especially critical in performance contexts where immediate acoustic adaptation is required. The system allows direct manipulation of capsule parameters during rehearsal or installation, effectively transforming the microphone into a performative instrument. The article compares the prototype with existing commercial ambisonic microphones, highlighting its distinctive advantages in workflow and compositional strategy. Use-case scenarios demonstrate how real-time control over spatial parameters enhances both technical precision and artistic expressiveness. The article concludes with a discussion of future directions, including collaborative testing with practitioners and integration into creative environments where spatial transparency, fidelity and interactivity are essential.