A Thing in the Weave of Things: SONAMB’s NEURAL MATERIALS and Sonic Materialism in the age of artificial intelligence

Journal article

NEURAL MATERIALS (2024) is a live AV show created by SONAMB (Vicky Clarke). The project represents a collaboration between Vicky Clarke, visual artist Sean Clarke, and industry partner Bela, a company specialising in hardware with interactive sensors for music-making. The AV show utilises a new performance system incorporating a hybrid set-up in combination with both a sound sculpture and the output of a machine learning model trained on a ‘post-industrial’ sonic dataset. The dataset renders in sound Manchester’s industrial past and present through field recordings of cotton mills, the canal network and the electromagnetic resonances of a newly gentrified city centre. This article analyses NEURAL MATERIALS as musical composition, live AV show and a demonstration of creative audio-generative AI, linking the work to scholarly and compositional legacies of Sonic Materialism and musique concrète. By combining documentation analysis and performance analysis, I interrogate how sound’s indexical properties are transformed via machine learning (ML) processes, questioning whether machines are able to evoke a sense of space or heritage. Ultimately, I contend that such audio-generative systems have the capacity to reshape our perception of industrial histories, technologies and future sonic realities, indexing sociohistorical cues that are reactivated at the point of listening.

Authors: Packham, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music and Technology
• Pages: 1-12
• Publication date: 2026-02-25
• Acceptance date: 2026-01-20
• DOI: 10.1017/s1355771826101137
• EISSN: 1469-8153
• ISSN: 1355-7718
• Language: English
• Keywords: technology; Contemporary music; machine learning; musique concrete; industrial revolution