Sonic agencies of climate change refers to the relational fluxes of human and nonhuman agencies sounding and musicking the climate crisis. This article discusses what understandings of Indigenous onto-epistemologies of the nonhuman in commercial music can contribute to the notion and vice-versa. In Greenland, site of the rapidly melting North Polar Ice Cap, popular song lyrics in Inuit Greenlandic or Kalallissut as well as their music videos and album cover art engage nonhuman aspects of human internal experiences and societal coming-to-terms around global heating. Sonic agencies of climate change is used here to investigate how emotion, affect, protest, and debate through musicking—which music scholarship tends to approach anthropocentrically—navigate the nonhuman as well as human-nonhuman relationalities. Relevant Greenlandic musical contents pose alternatives to an epistemology behind climate change, while their commercialization relies on environmentally destructive industries. Sonic agencies of climate change may be politically, ideologically and otherwise complex and contradictory.

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.

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 reconsiders the polyphonic music fragments used within in an English manuscript copy of Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis, now Princeton University Library, Garrett 119. Extensive reuse of parchment characterises this manuscript: in addition to three music rolls, a chronicle roll and multiple account rolls were systematically repurposed to assemble the parchment used as the manuscript’s endleaves and also internally, when some of the rolls were erased and overwritten with the Alexandreis text. Through a close analysis of all these materials, the specific local contexts of the manuscript’s production is considered. The article demonstrates that this occurred in two stages, begun in the early thirteenth century and completed in the fourteenth century. While previous scholarship had located the host manuscript and music fragments in Lincolnshire, a Yorkshire location and a Cistercian institution is proposed here, possibly Rievaulx Abbey, at least for the initial compilation of the host manuscript and the copying of at least one of the music fragments. This opens up new possibilities for a flourishing network of written polyphony in this region.

This article explores political dimensions in Jiménez’s work, particularly the themes of liberation from societal oppression and memorialization of victims of violence. A focus is XLIII Memoriam Vivere, dedicated to the memory of the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who were abducted and murdered in on September 26, 2014; the perpetrators have not yet been brought to justice. The memory of the forty-three students is evoked through numerous references to the number 43 and the motto ‘Vivos’ (alive), presenting a reflection on a crime that has left a deep wound in the Mexican collective memory and an act of resistance against the forgetting of this injustice. In other works, the author address the oppression perpetuated by patriarchal and religious structures and interrogate the entrenchment of traditional gender roles. Music today must both confront the complex issues of our world and inspire actions to transform it.

This article critically examines how the concept of ‘Africanness’ in musical composition shapes the creative output of composers originating or with ancestry from the African continent. I start by investigating the complexities surrounding the term ‘African composer’, what the usage of the term means for Africans in their creative process, and ultimately, how it shapes their approach to composing.