I have just come home from a wonderful trip to the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium. Together with my KTH colleague Petra Jääskeläinen, I presented the paper “Sonic techno-ecologies and ethics of more-than-human data practices” at the conference Decentralised Creativity and Agential Systems.
Inspired by feminist data ethics, we probe the question of how more-than-human data ethics can be formed and practised in art and science where sound, mediated with technology, is central to how a phenomenon is represented and experienced. Building on the work of the wonderful music scholar Milla Tiainen at University of Turku, we propose sonic techno-ecologies to capture these assemblages, and ask how consideration and care can be taken towards the more-than-human beings involved in these processes.
As case studies, we discuss 1) The Place Where You Go to Listen by John Luther Adams, which uses weather and seismographic data collected in real-time and sonified by the artist, 2) the NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory which is used to sonify a black hole using X-ray data, and 3) Machine Auguries by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, a sound and light installation using local bird sound data which is then used to train an AI model that produces synthetic bird sounds. All these examples use situated ecological data which is technologically mediated in one or another way.
As our work with this project continues, we will propose more-than-human data ethics principles to be considered in sonic techno-ecologies that explore a phenomenon with or through sound, technology, data, and living and non-living entities.
Thank you, Ghent!
Elin Kanhov, Ph.D. 
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