Seba Kayan - Tuning Towards Listening: Decolonise Electronic Music

Sound Practice Research and PGR Research Series present this artist talk by Seba Kayan, a Kurdish-Austrian electronic music composer, producer and lecturer based in Vienna.

Through the lens of tuning and questions of listening, this lecture explores the cultural assumptions embedded in electronic music and its technologies. Drawing on sound studies, decolonial research and her own artistic practice, Seba Kayan examines how colonial power structures and Eurocentric narratives shape listening habits and perceptions of what sounds 'in tune'.

Using examples from her research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, her productions and collaborative projects such as Hadra Rave, she considers how maqam-led improvisation - a highly sophisticated, spontaneous musical composition practice central to Arabic, Turkish, and Middle Eastern classical music - can guide electronic composition. Listening examples and a practical demonstration make tuning relationships beyond twelve-tone equal temperament audible and open up new compositional possibilities.

Approaching listening as a culturally, historically and technologically situated practice, the lecture encourages audiences and practitioners to question what is often treated as musically universal or “correct” and invites them to move beyond the default settings of electronic music production.

Seba Kayan is a Kurdish-Austrian electronic music composer, producer and lecturer. Her work brings Kurdish, Anatolian and Arabic musical practices into electronic composition, focusing on microtonal tuning, maqam-led improvisation and the politics of listening. She has taught Decolonize Electronic Music at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been presented internationally, including at Ars Electronica, Wiener Festwochen, Biennale Matter of Art (Prague), Visa for Music (Rabat) and the Austrian Cultural Forum (New York). In 2026, she was nominated for an Amadeus Austrian Music Award in the Electronic/Dance category.

This talk has been made possible by funding from the Austrian Cultural Forum London .

https://www.sebakayan.com/

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