Hacking Bias: Rethinking Gender through AI and Instrument Design

Bias is deeply ingrained in both society and music, especially against underrepresented communities. Any algorithm or data-driven AI system using data produced by such a society will inevitably inherit these biases. This is particularly relevant in digital music platforms, where minority groups remain underrepresented.

This talk examines some consequences of the use of data-driven AI in the music industry, focusing on the systemic issue of bias in digital music platforms. Current music metadata standards, such as those from DDEX, omit gender information. This omission prevents recommendation algorithms from detecting or correcting existing gender disparities, thereby amplifying the invisibility and reducing the income for minority-gender artists.

The Gender Music Tech and Gender Music Metadata projects directly address this issue. They propose an ethical, interoperable and gender-inclusive metadata system. The main contribution is to integrate structured, self-declared gender fields into industry standards, which will enable fairness-aware recommendation algorithms and ensure equitable discoverability for all creators. This is a realistic and scalable path to correct gender imbalances.

More broadly, this talk opens the debate on how to fix the systemic lack of diversity, inequity and exclusion (LIE) in the design of recommendation algorithms and data-driven AI systems.

Eva Navarro López has developed her career at prestigious institutions across both industry and academia in four different countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Spain. Until recently, she was Professor of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Director of the School of Information at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Previously, she worked at the University of Manchester with the last student of Alan Turing.

She is a passionate scientist and enthusiastic educator whose genuinely multidisciplinary research is internationally recognised in AI, cyber-physical systems, control engineering and complex systems. Known as a “scientist-artist”, she blends philosophy, arts and music into her work.

Professor Navarro actively promotes AI democratisation and equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility through global initiatives. She is a co-founder of ACM-Women Europe, the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Council on Women in Computing in Europe, contributes to UNESCO’s Inclusive Policy Lab, and is on the Advisory Council of the Gender Music Tech project. She is also a member of the Science and Methodology Committee and Scientific Panel on AI and Economic Inclusion at the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE). Her work has been recognised in the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2025” global list.

More information at www.evanavarro.org.

Musical instruments are our first encounters with sound-making technologies-acoustic, mechanical, electronic, and digital. As such, they are both gateways and gatekeepers to musical participation. Their material affordances not only produce sound-making itself, but also organise musical spaces as sites of action, relation, and expression. In this talk, I take the electric guitar as an example through which questions of gender and bodily difference intersect with the logics of techno-design. I focus on how, in the 21st century, guitar makers have sought to intervene in the traditionally white, hetero-masculine player canon, through acts of instrument redesign. These new instruments fall into two interconnected categories: commercially produced models created for women and girl players, and signature guitars co-designed by women and queer artists such as St. Vincent, H.E.R., and Yvette Young. Through examining specific guitars and guitarists, I explore how these instruments participate in processes of doing gender and reimagining sonic agency, while also asking what other logics underpin these instrument redesigns. What hierarchies persist when gendered and racialised differences become product differentiation, and how do guitars, like other technologies, remain tied to the consumer logics and extractive practices that make them possible?

Jill Halstead is Professor of Music at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen, where she also leads the *Grieg Research School in Interdisciplinary Music Studies*, a doctoral research consortium of five universities on Norway’s west coast. Her published work often examines how gender intersects with other identities to shape creative practices, as well as access to and participation in music. She has specialised in interdisciplinary projects with marginalised communities, most recently including participatory work with elders, and composing music for film and dance theatre works addressing the social stigmatisation of ageing and dis/ability. Since 2018 she has collaborated with Brandon LaBelle on the artistic research project *Social Acoustics*, which explores listening as a social practice. She currently leads *Music4Change*, an Erasmus+ funded project focused on social and environmental sustainability in music research and education, and Gender, Technology, Participation, a transdisciplinary project addressing equity and representation in music and sound technologies.