Elin Kanhov

I am currently a PI and researcher in the project "Musical Entanglements with AI: Posthumanist Perspectives on Creating, Consuming and Connecting with AI Music", a 3.5 million SEK and three-year research grant funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project sets out to investigate how posthuman subjects and identities are formed in the encounter between music and artificial intelligence; how experiences, affects, and values arise around AI music; and which musical aesthetic expressions and discourses emanate from this domain. The project was initiated in 2025.

Between 2023-2025 I was a postdoctoral researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology where I study the prospects and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) as it develops in music practice, as part of the ERC funded MUSAiC project. 

I have a PhD in musicology from Stockholm University, Sweden. My doctoral thesis explores conceptions of nature in contemporary Western art music, and how positions and relations between humans, music and nature are questioned and challenged in that musical sphere. Working with concepts from Deleuze-Guattarian thought, as well as engaging with posthumanist and new materialist thinking, my analyses of contemporary music challenges conceptions of nature that are perceived as rigid and in opposition to what is conceived as culture. Studying affinities between humans and animals, coexistence between humans and nature, and music-natures as disruptive and resisting harmony and order, my thesis explores how music can be a particular process of knowledge production when it comes to exploring material-discursive nature-cultures.

In my research, I combine the fields of musicology, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies with a focus on AI, and what holds these different fields together is the focus on posthumanist approaches and methodologies - developing what might be called a posthumanist music studies.