AL.FESTIVAL.2025: Liberating music technology | Dr Laurel Pardue, Basel Naouri, Rami Abadir, P Kirn

On Wednesday, October 08th, AL.Berlin hosted a panel talk at Niemetzstraße around the topic Liberating music technology: Re-engineering for Arabic music and beyond.

Music technology’s strong bias toward a narrow set of so-called “common-practice” Western European conventions is well-known. And it can exact real political, societal, and human costs as a vehicle for exclusion and erasure. But how can artists and engineers break that normative, restrictive design? With Arabic music practice (traditional and new) and other regional and diasporic practices around AL.Festival as a frame, we ask our panel to consider how to challenge those norms. We invite examination of engineering and design, music and digital media, journalism, and production and performance practice. Where are there possibilities for industry and artists to change course -- especially with the danger that machine learning could make culture more flattened and extractive than ever before? How can this be living and active, and not reduced to “preservation?” All our minds have been colonized in some ways, especially across the diaspora. We’ll look at practices of musical creativity that can liberate them.

Participants: Dr Laurel Pardue - Software Engineer and Researcher (Ableton) Basel Naouri - Independent Curator, Media Artist, Musician (Slowfuture, TimeLab, Recordat, El Morabba3) Rami Abadir - Producer, Journalist ( ABADIR, ma3azef)

Organised and moderated by PETER KIRN