Elin Kanhov

I am a is a postdoctoral researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology where I study the prospects and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) as it develops in the musical field, as part of the ERC funded MUSAiC project. I'm currently working on projects that explore what it means to make music with AI, focusing on aspects such as networks, more-than-human agency and creativity; the tensions that appear between traditional music communities and AI music generative models; and ethnographic challenges of studying online AI music communities.

As a fellow of the Bernadotte programme, I also have a project that studies contemporary Swedish art music engaging with the Anthropocene, post-anthropocentric perspectives, and relations between text and music from ecocritical positions.

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 thus 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.