The Igbo of Nigeria, a patriarchal ethnic nation, promotes gender binaries cultivated through cultural and social ideologies and contexts. Existing studies reveal how distinctions between the male and female sexes are deliberately entrenched, promoted and fairly accepted within the society through binary gender identities in all human endeavours. Paradoxically, however, the same culture seems to accept a form of oddity and subversive indigenous music, dance and costume culture presented as Adamma masquerade. This paper, by means of ethnographic, descriptive analysis and culture-owner interactions, interrogates the oxymoronic or self-contradictory notions on gender identities expressed through Adamma music and dance genre.

Sound and new media arts appear to be both historical and contemporary means to invest in the notion of more-than-human. Although the concept was formulated in the late 1990s (Abram 1996), certain related practices in art works exploring machine or animal agency have existed since the 1960s, especially in new media arts using sound, video, and electronic and computational technologies.

Since around 2005, an increasing number of songs have emerged in the Republic of Cyprus that use elements from the Greek Cypriot cultural heritage, like lyrics in Cypriot Greek, folk music features and other references to ‘tradition’. These songs belong to contemporary genres, including rock, metal, fusion and hip hop, genres that already existed in the country but became ‘localised’ in a different manner, owing to the socio-political context. This article presents the first attempt to situate the popular musicscape of the Republic of Cyprus within debates pertaining to global musical flows, describing this context and arguing that the turn to elements from the Greek Cypriot cultural heritage is a recent phenomenon. We argue that this process signifies a new era of music-making in the Republic of Cyprus that can be theorised as ‘cosmopolitan localism’.

Despite huge devastation of land in southeastern Nigeria, music scholarship in that region is yet to engage environmental crisis. This paper explicates environment through the concepts and practices of mbem, an indigenous musical style of the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria. Employing ethnomusicological and ecomusicological approaches, I argue that respect, cooperation and reciprocity, principles of Igbo Indigenous Ecological knowledge system, inform Igbo environmental perspectives and constitute sustainable environmental practices. This article contributes new theoretical perspectives to contemporary global debate on environmental sustainability, spiritual ecologies, and culture by its transdisciplinary conversation between music, environment, decolonialism, spirituality, and society in Igbo community.

This article maps out some of the relationships between performers and their instruments in live and improvised electronic music. In these practices, musical machines – be they computers, mechanical assemblages or combinations of different sound-makers and processors – act as generators of musical material and sources of unpredictability with which to improvise. As a lens through which to consider these practices, we examine a number of different roles these musical machines may take on during improvised performances. These include running, playing, surprising, evolving, malfunctioning, collaborating and learning. We explore the values of these different roles to the improvising musician, and contextualise them within some broad and historical trends of contemporary music. Finally, we consider how this taxonomy may make us more open to the vital materialism of musical instruments, and offer novel insights into the flows of agency and interaction possibilities in technologically mediated musical practices.

The article takes Boethius’s theory of musical harmony as a starting point, in particular studying the collective dimension embedded in this concept. The dynamics of contact and interdetermination, between humans and other-than-human, are explored and understood as factors co-involved in the possibility of common living. The role of the notions of ecology and economy in rereading the concept of harmony provided by Boethius’s theory is also reviewed. The text then explores a site-specific work that experiments with these issues through the creation of an acousmatic patch that is superimposed onto a broken ecology, showing how this serves as an agent for a reharmonisation of a drought-ravaged river. The article concludes by addressing the implications that a territorially situated musical approach might represent for recovery of the broken link between humans and the other-than-human.

The power of African music to critically engage with new experiences is demonstrated in its ongoing responsiveness to the historical and power dynamics of colonialism. The overlaps between precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods in terms of the social and political experiences that define them provide the context for my analysis of what I call the African musical postcolony. By linking musical form, styles, and biographies to social and political developments, I show how the complex and overlapping relationships between the different phases of African history are reflected in the ways in which African musicians engage with issues of power and the politics of difference.

Machine listening takes place through sonification. Sound is treated as data by a computer that listens by deconstructing and reconstructing sound. To better explore the aesthetic, relational and ontological aspects of machine listening, this article reflects upon the Fourier analysis, which is vital for machine learning algorithms. It then outlines the listening modes articulated by French composer Pierre Schaeffer and updates them for the new material conditions of contemporary listening. It proposes that a new mode, identified while working with sonification, be added to Schaeffer’s classic array. It explores non-human listening among machines that listen with other concerns beyond the human need to interpret content. Thus, this article makes a particular strategic move: it centres around machine listening, which enables computers to perform analyses of a soundscape, and resynthesis, a mode of sonification that treats sound as data, to reintroduce the ‘sound object’ nature of resynthesised sounds. It looks at sonification through discourse analysis and media archaeology, and gives importance to experiments in art that privilege sensorial and affective dimensions often ignored by scientific approaches. It proposes that thinking about machine listening through sonification can assist in developing sensibilities that are more responsive to the present sonic ecologies between human and non-human listeners.

While mathematics and technologic systems have been intrinsically developed with purposes of representing and computing problems with a human-centric orientation, they nonetheless can be considered to have non-human agency. Drawing on anthropology and architecture studies, this article argues that the human-based logics underpinning mathematics and technologies does not delimit them as human entities, and that they can exhibit influential capacities when engaged with during processes of artistic making. This idea is demonstrated through the development of a visitor-interactive audiovisual artwork. The software environments IanniX and Max were actants in the experimental process of sonifying hyperbolic paraboloid (hypar) planes, as well as the mathematic equations themselves. This article discusses how mathematic and technologic agency affected the development of three hypar models used in the piece, as well as an initial unused version. It also discusses how hardware interface objects influenced human-computer interaction design. The article will interest scholars of technologic agency and practitioners interested in converting three-dimensional planes into sound or creating interactive exhibition technology.

The discourse of music reflects historical and cultural changes, interwoven with a multitude of social dynamics. Beyond lyrics, music—through voices and performance—conveys gender stereotypes, often legitimised through repetition. This article examines the construction of voice in Kerala’s popular music, tracing the evolution of the gender stereotyping of voice across three distinct phases: from the period of social dramas following the advent of film music to film music at the beginning of the 21st century. A discourse analysis approach is employed to explore how gendered vocal expressions are shaped and transmitted through popular music culture. Qualitative interviews with practitioners and music experts supplement the analysis, offering deeper insight into Kerala’s sonic landscape and the ways in which music participates in the cultural construction of gender.

This article presents the concept of a ‘haptic aurality’ in soundscape composition, an aesthetic and perceptual model derived from visual art theory, media studies and phenomenology that extends the haptic beyond its common association to vibroacoustic phenomena in the sonic arts. Included in this framework are both the standard haptic arguments, from psychology and engineering, including notions of kinaesthesia and proprioception, and varied definitions of the haptic as a not necessarily tactile mode of knowing touch that involves synaesthesia, transmodal perception and philosophical notions of sensory dedifferentiation. In adapting this survey of sometimes contradictory accounts of the haptic as parameters for compositional analysis and application, the article simultaneously creates novel engagements between soundscape composition and acousmatic practice.