Welcome to the first The Posthumanities Hub webinar of the Fall 2024! It will take place on Thursday 26 September at 13.15-15.00 hrs CET on Zoom , with our dear Dr. Elin Kanhov (KTH). (Image credit: Evelina Jonsson/Azote)

Elin says: “In this webinar, I attend to two major challenges of the 21^st century – climate change and the technological advancements of artificial intelligence – and how music is affected by and responds to these challenges. Although seemingly widely different aspects of the world we live in today, these two challenges can be understood as results of the same political, socio-cultural, and technological developments that we have experienced in the past half a century or so, tied together by late capitalism, globalisation, and neoliberal culture.

Throughout history, Western art music has drawn inspiration from nature, and nature has been conceptualised in music differently depending on the ideologies of the time. Today, contemporary composers engage with nature in music with the constant presence of climate change and environmental issues, which creates incentives to affirmatively explore the complex workings of nature and more-than-human relationships through their music. Turning to music and AI, the technological advancements seen today in this field are in many perspectives disruptive. Music made with or by AI poses threats to copyright and intellectual property, streaming platforms are swamped with spam music, and AI risks homogenising musical creativity and aesthetics. Still, AI also provides the potential to explore identities, create new entanglements between individuals and collectives, and transform human-technological agency in the creative process.

Tying together music, nature, and AI, this talk takes you through a journey of birdsong, outdoor percussion performance, nonhuman data ethics in sound ecologies, and audio-visual deepfake technologies. Through a posthumanist methodology, I explore how we can think with music to understand these entangled assemblages of the more-than-human world.

As a preparatory reading for this seminar, feel free to read the paper by myself and our fellow co-hubber Petra Jääskeläinen, “Data Ethics and Practices of Human-Nonhuman Sound Technologies and Ecologies”, linked below.”

Bio: Elin Kanhov is a researcher and musicologist working with perspectives from the feminist posthumanities, environmental humanities, critical theory, and poststructuralist philosophy. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in AI Music Studies in the ERC-funded project Music at the Frontiers of Artificial Creativity and Criticism (MUSAiC) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.

• The research project MUSAiC at KTH: https://musaiclab.wordpress.com/
• Jääskeläinen, P., & Kanhov, E. (2024). Data Ethics and Practices of Human-Nonhuman Sound Technologies and Ecologies. arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.10756. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.10756
• Doctoral thesis: https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-216328

Zoom link: https://liu-se.zoom.us/j/7402234640?omn=66375358037