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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.