Megan Steinberg

Megan is the PRiSM Lucy Hale Doctoral Composer in Association with Drake Music, researching and creating art that explores ableist bias in AI.

Photograph by Sam Walton
samwaltonphotography.com

Megan is a composer, sound artist and abstract turntablist. Her works and research look at putting accessibility at the start of creative process.

She will be working with professional disabled musicians throughout her PhD, exploring graphics, text, improvisation and the aesthetics of failure. The collaborative partnership with Drake Music – working with performers using Accessible Musical Instruments – is the heart of her research.

She has previously been Composer-in-Residence at the Picture Gallery at Royal Holloway and was awarded the F.I. Williams Price for Composition in 2016. Her doctoral research began in Autumn 2021, and it is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and awarded in the name of composer Lucy Hale.

Megan is a dedicated advocate for accessibility and representation in new music. When she’s not making noise with instruments, found audio or vinyl records, she is most likely discussing video games, architecture, feminism, environmentalism and mental health.

 

As Artificial Intelligence grows, so do conversations about its magnification of human bias. The lack of representation in the industry, and in datasets used by neural networks, proves potentially dangerous to members of society who have been historically marginalised or underrepresented. I will be working to highlight this inequality by creating new datasets, music and sound that represent people AI – or its creators – deem to be ‘outliers’.

Megan Steinberg, PRiSM Lucy Hale Doctoral Composer in Association with Drake Music

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