Embedding Data into Instruments: An Ethical-Embodied Framework for Electroacoustic Practice

Abstract Data-embedded instruments that couple sensing, modelling and sound production are increasingly used in electroacoustic practice, yet their ethical and cultural configurations remain under-analysed. This article develops an ethical-embodied framework for examining how particular data, sensing and mapping arrangements configure relations of care, listening and musical agency. Drawing on feminist and decolonial listening practices, disability and critical data studies and accounts of embodied instrumentality, it combines a selective genealogy of electroacoustic and globally situated practices with a mid-level comparative lens that treats its technical axes as heuristic rather than taxonomic. Case vignettes analyse works using gesture tracking, electromyography (EMG) and brain–computer interfaces (BCI), audience-sensing installations and machine-learning vocal systems, alongside the author’s own data-embedded instrument. Across these examples, the analysis shows how similar technologies can reproduce or contest institutional surveillance, extractivism and aesthetic normativity and outlines implications for the design, evaluation and teaching of data-mediated musical systems foregrounding situated listening and collective accountability.