MW:M Research

Welcome to Most Wanted: Music Research Presentation Track: a day where sound meets inquiry and creativity meets reflection. We begin with a short listening experience to set the tone for a program of inspiring talks and performances exploring how research and music intersect, evolve, and shape artistic and technological practices.

This presentation explores themes of sound and imagination through research-led practice. Based on the work of Pauline Oliveros and Bryon Gysin, Sonia Killmann‘s research focuses on active listening through mental imagery in collective listening spaces. The research is shared through workshop performances that have a participatory element rooted in collective improvisation and promote imaginative listening through closed eyes. Sonia Killmann will share current reflections of a workshop performance conducted at Open Out festival in Tromsø with cellist Simone Seales This performance took place in a queer-only space. After the reflection, Sonia will lead a collective listening exercise to demonstrate their research to this date.

For blind and partially sighted (BPS) producers, the digital studio tends to withhold flow. Most crucial information relies on visual interface feedback and while existing accessibility tools have become more available and effective, they still compete for the same auditory attention the producer wants to give to listening. This paper follows the idea that the missing information can reach the fingers at the point of control through haptics rather than speech feedback.
This session will reflect on research exploring haptic solutions, through the lens of flow. Since haptic feedback can be built into familiar gear from the design stage, it deserves everyone’s attention and this session will discuss how industry can respond and adapt.

Today’s generative music systems are one-shot: a prompt goes in, a finished track comes out. Goneis the artist’s subconscious signature, built over years and shaped by taste and the tools at their disposal. This automates the product of music-making while discarding the process of real-time, negotiated interplay through which musicians actually create.
History, however, shows us that artists adapt to new technologies by making them their own. With this context this talk proposes rewiring generative AI from an instrument of automation into a partner in collaboration, the kind you play with rather than prompt. The session will outline the path from offline, one-shot generation toward online systems that can jam with the artist.

Addressing the Rewire! theme, the talk will explain how the connection most worth patching is between artists and machines that play together. It is an open invite to musicians, technologists and researchers to discuss what such an agent must do to earn a place on stage.

In this 20-minute session, the three most innovative research ideas for master’s theses in computational music studies will be presented by their student authors from the Audio Communication and Technology programme at TU Berlin. This will be followed by a short award ceremony by the lecturer, who will explain the selection and the reasons for the first prize. The purpose of the session is to enable music technology students with innovative ideas to network with stakeholders from the music industry, acquire feedback, and potentially initiate future collaborations.
Selected contributions this year are as follows:
Niklas Werani: Local Connections as Explanatory Factors for Spotify Chart Success
Lotto Thomas: Playlisting Enbies. Investigating Gender Bias in Spotify’s Curation with a Focus on Non-Binary Artists
Paula Gnoth: Human Curation in the Age of Algorithms: A Look at NTS Radio as Streaming Platforms Took Over

This study explores the folk musical instruments, songs and cultural activities of a community residing southwest in the Konso zone of Ethiopia, specifically Fasha and Gamole. The focus of this research is on folk music, associated ceremonies and how the Konso musical traditions are practiced today.

The study is based around a musical ethnography approach grounded in a conceptual framework of music as culture and relied upon data collection through observation, participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, musical discographies and the reviewing of documents. The findings identified key folk instruments, including horns, wind instruments, percussion and lyres, with particular focus on the Komborta, Kawla and Kihayitta instruments.

The study also examines traditional folk music styles and dances such as Irgotta and Leotta. Overall, the musical characteristics of the Konso community reveal highly synchronised, sophisticated and complex patterns of music and dance, which will be explored in depth in the session.

Contemporary music production comprises an expanding ecosystem of tools. DAWs, plug-ins, sample platforms, AI generators, sharing services, cloud storage and analytics platforms support and expand the possibilities of production. Yet they raise a deeper question: what kind of practice are they designed to support?
This presentation argues that contemporary production has evolved beyond making as its sole emphasis. Instead, it is increasingly shaped by shifting roles and expanding technologies and as such, production increasingly involves mediation so that work can carry forward.
Drawing on practice-based doctoral research, this presentation proposes a shift toward designing tools for navigating production as an evolving practice. It offers work-in-progress and speculative directions for future tools that better account for what production now entails. The central proposition is simple: we are not lacking tools for making. We are lacking tools for navigating what making has become.

Recording is more than a century old. Electronic music is no longer new. Sampling has long belonged to studio practice and to DJ culture alike. The contemporary shift lies elsewhere: in the material control of sound transformation and in the possibility of treating recorded sound as an instrument. The session examines three conditions of such reinstrumentation. The first concerns control. The second concerns the material. The third concerns listening itself. Each condition is specified through closely analysed examples of sound fabrication: phase-vocoder stretching of a creak, slowing down of a metallic rattle, transposition of a mechanical cycle, phase-shifted looping of a rebound and so on. This session draws on a daily recording practice, on the descriptive database built from it and on the audiovisual performance ‘Instrument d’état’ (Rio de Janeiro, 2026).

This presentation explores how academic tutorials support the learning experiences of neurodivergent international students in higher music education.
The study adopts a qualitative which was based upon visual representations of how students experience their learning experiences. The findings showed that tutorials extend beyond academia, functioning as relational learning spaces that foster confidence, belonging and psychological safety. Their effectiveness and inclusivity depend on factors including institutional processes, accessibility, time, learning environments and material resources.
The study conceptualises tutorials as sociomaterial practices through which inclusion is negotiated rather than assumed. It also demonstrates the value of Inquiry Graphics as an innovative multimodal method for exploring neurodivergent student experiences. The findings offer practical implications for designing more inclusive tutorial systems.

Independent artists today have access to global audiences through streaming platforms, social media and digital distribution. However, access has not directly translated into sustainable careers in many emerging music markets. This paper investigates “why” with a focus on Georgia’s music market.
Conducting a quantitative survey of 78 active Georgian musicians alongside a review of international literature, the research examines three main areas: business models, digital marketing practices and structural support mechanisms.
The digital transformation has lowered barriers to entry but has not addressed deeper ecosystem challenges and this talk will use Georgia as a representation of many small and emerging music markets.
In line with the theme, the presentation proposes that improving music ecosystems requires reconnecting artists, education, industry professionals, public institutions and digital platforms rather than relying only on technological innovation or musical democratisation.

How can artists and cultural practitioners better understand, reflect on, and articulate how their work relates to the social forces?
Funders and platforms increasingly ask artists to demonstrate relevance to social, political or technological change, requiring them to name precisely how their work relates to a social force, not just that it does.
The framework presented here will distinguish three types of relation between an artwork and a social force. These frameworks can make work visible, experienceable, or capable of creating new conditions.
Participants will gain the framework through a short paper and a presentation drawing on examples from the German funding landscape, existing artworks and the speaker’s own work.
This will be a hands-on session follows, in which participants apply the given framework to their own projects, applications, or artistic work.

The European music industry exhibits profound structural gender inequalities, evidenced by the marginal representation of women and gender-expansive individuals in key creative, executive and public-facing roles. In response, a vast, but fragmented ecosystem of initiatives has emerged to address this. This paper presents a critical case study and reflection on the development of GENiE (Gender Equality Networks in Music), a digital database which maps over 600 gender equality initiatives.
This paper details the challenges of constructing a pan-European database and rigorously examines the significant ethical dilemmas encountered, from gatekeeping to the risk of weaponisation in hostile political environments. Ultimately, the paper contends that projects like GENiE, are essential but must continually navigate the paradox of replicating the very structural burdens they seek to dismantle.

This project explores how translocal mobility shapes musical practices and self-concepts among cosmopolitan musicians embedded in the popular music scenes of Friedrichshain–Kreuzberg. Drawing on research with internationally mobile musicians from the Global North, it examines how relocation into a cosmopolitan urban context reconfigures processes of identification, belonging and musical creativity beyond ethnic-national or diasporic frameworks.
The material also raises questions of classed mobility, linguistic capital and access to urban musical infrastructures, as well as forms of gatekeeping that operate within ostensibly open music scenes, and the role of local cultural policy in producing “cosmopolitan” musical spaces.
Situating these questions within debates on translocality, cosmopolitanism and urban ethnomusicology, the project treats Berlin not as an exceptional case, but as a starting point for comparative inquiry into the politics of cosmopolitan music-making in contemporary cities.

Music has always been a communal activity. Yet modern Western concert culture has largely reduced audiences to passive observers. This talk challenges this convention by exploring how technology can help restore the historically participatory and collaborative spirit of musical practice. Drawing on anthropological perspectives, this presentation traces the evolution of the audience-performer relationship and asks: what are we losing? Can we get it back?

The talk will include attendees of music events (concerts, installations) in an active manner, from social musicking to co-composing. Together this ‘modern opera’ will be a multidisciplinary live experience where technology seamlessly integrates music, drama, dance, lighting and audience interaction. Lessons learned from deployments across multiple contexts will be shared, alongside a discussion of the design challenges, open questions, and future directions for audience participation technology in live music.

Die BMC als wertvollste Musik-Ökosystem-Struktur Berlins gemeinsam und mit KI weiterentwickeln:

Ein KI-gestützter, partizipativer Think Tank für BMC-Genoss:innen, Musikschaffende, Veranstalter, Nachwuchskräfte, Expert:innen, Technologiepioniere und Bürger:innen.

Eingeladen sind alle,die die Zukunft der BMC mit Blick auf zentrale Kernaufgaben der BMC als sozialer Ökosystem-Struktur-Aufgaben strategisch entwickeln wollen!

Nach einer kurzen Einführung von Carsten Winter zum Thema soziale Ökosysteme und soziale Ökosystemstrukturen, konzentriert sich der GMM/BMC kollaborative ThinkTank auf vier Schwerpunkte, zu denen individuelle persönliche Impulse zum Anstoß der Kollaboration untereinander und mit der KI gegeben werden:

1. BMC Geschäftsstellenarbeit/Co-Organisation von Unterstützung durch die BMC (C. Winter)
2. Youth – Professionalisierung von Young Professionals in Music durch die BMC (L. Dawurske)
3. BMC Veranstaltungen, insbesondere Entwicklung der MW:M als Musikökosystem-Event (C. Vulco)
4. Künstliche Intelligenz: Integration von KI in die BMC-Strukturen und Prozesse (M. Strobel).


Die Futures Canvas Kollaborations-Session wird in Zusammenarbeit mit der Gesellschaft für Musikwirtschafts- und Musikkulturforschung (GMM e.V.) organisiert.