This video will blow you away. Anyone who spends time online has encountered some version of this message, whether in a friend’s post, a corporation’s advertisement, or a video’s own description. When the promise is fulfilled, we experience virtuosity: skill made apparent and socially meaningful. This paper combines first-person phenomenology with critical voices from music and media studies to explore how streaming platforms in general (and YouTube in particular) structure mediated encounters with virtuosic bodies. Navigating between techno-determinism on one side and an over-emphasis on individual agency on the other, I examine how digital architecture and the algorithms operating within it exercise a social power that we regularly experience, even if their technical workings remain opaque. Drawing on phenomenology’s description of the ways that values and judgments are already temporally “on all sides” of experience, I argue that algorithmic recommendations increasingly replicate these subjective contributions to experience in the media objects themselves, leading to overlapping intensifications and crises of value. Their power is “soft” but extraordinarily strong; in surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), algorithms effectively produce and monitor conduits for viewer’s attention, which functions simultaneously as leisure and digital labor. The very intimacy of the encounter—platforms provide individualized recommendations for content that we stream in our homes on devices that serve as constant companions—frequently turns listeners’ concerns back on themselves. Our everyday being is at once the reality we escape through streaming entertainment, the engine of the economic environment, and the experience’s interpretive focus.

On May 16^th, 2024, the Kurdish Exile Museum in Stockholm, Sweden received a three-month lease termination notice following the sale of their unit’s building at Dalagatan 48. The grassroots museum spent its remaining days experimenting with digitizing the spatial configuration of its collection at Dalagatan 48 with hopes of rebuilding the museum using virtual reality and artificial intelligence technology to help mitigate difficulties in finding an affordable location. However, the process of digitization and maintaining open access to the museum online brings a new set of economic challenges in maintaining data storage on servers. Drawing on in-person and digital ethnographic research conducted in Stockholm, I analyze how the abrupt physical displacement of the museum’s audio collections mirrors the experience of the museum founder’s displacement that initially brought the museum and the audio materials into virtualized being outside of the Kurdish borderlands. The audio collection itself contains a substantial amount of music written by exiled Kurdish musicians who routinely highlight their own experiences of displacement. Additionally, many of these audio materials have physically moved in and out of the Kurdish borderlands, maintaining sonic cultural connections between displaced and home communities (Reigle 2013 and Aksoy 2006). I argue that rather than ensuring Kurdish cultural survival against political and economic odds, the virtualization (Deleuze 1966) of the Kurdish Exile Museum’s displaced audio collections through digitization reflects and adds to multiple layers of displacement within Kurdish cultural memory.

This paper illuminates how frameworks and repertoires rooted in Western musical practice—e.g. staff notation, keyboard instrumentation, the MIDI format, and the canonical corpus of musical works (as embodied in scores and recordings)—constitute a self-reinforcing dominant system that limits the analytical and creative scope of both human and AI musical praxis. The underlying logical structure shared by these frameworks—their implicit data architecture—is taken as the lingua franca when encoding musical data for training AI models and for computational music research more broadly (Savage, 2022). Inevitably, systems trained on a dataset incorporate remnants of the cognitive frameworks used to structure that data, effectively forming the “environment, the world that it navigates” (Miller, 2022). As scholars of diverse musical cultures know, many traditions are based in non-notated yet idiomatically precise theoretical paradigms that are incompatible with this Western-centric model—a notion echoing longstanding debates over the limitations of staff notation in transcribing diverse musical practices (Seeger, 1957; Hood, 1971; Ellingson, 1992). This misalignment leaves these traditions vulnerable to underrepresentation—or exclusion—in the AI systems that increasingly shape how music is created, disseminated, and consumed in the 21st century (Drott, 2018; Shin, 2024). In highlighting this representational gap, this paper calls for a reimagining of music data architectures tuned to the unique structures of diverse traditions. As a case study, it discusses how the dominant model is ill-suited to Hindustani music and presents the Interactive Digital Transcription and Analysis Platform (IDTAP)—software developed to fit the logics of Hindustani music—as one such intervention.

Pop music is a site where gendered expectations are often reinforced yet can also be subverted. My research draws parallels between the U.S. and Mandopop/C-pop industries, examining how music technology, particularly electronic sound design, has enabled female producers in both industries to reclaim creative agency, challenge entrenched norms, and blur traditional gendered sonic boundaries. Tools like DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) and synthesizers empower women to disrupt stereotypes tied to historically gendered associations of sound, reshaping the production process.

Using ethnographic insights, the study examines how women leverage electronic production to explore bold, synthetic textures that defy sonic conventions. By comparing Mandopop producers like Lexie Liu to U.S. pioneers such as SOPHIE, the research highlights how both challenge gendered sonic traditions in their cultural contexts. SOPHIE’s hyperreal soundscapes and manipulation of synthetic textures created a gender-fluid sonic identity, questioning conventional binaries. Similarly, Lexie Liu’s use of glitchy beats, layered polyrhythms, and pitch-shifted vocals straddles and subverts “masculine” and “feminine” sound.

While both industries demonstrate disruptive potential, China's platformized ecosystem, dominated by interactive platforms like QQ Music and NetEase Cloud, adds excessive algorithmic pressures and audience scrutiny, complicating female producers' navigation of creativity and agency. This comparison reveals how globalized music technologies empower women to redefine identities, experiment with electronic arrangements, and challenge long-standing gender norms while presenting unprecedented obstacles in their navigation of the audience-led industry environment driven by algorithm and AI in the near future.