Our Manifesto
Sonic Liberation Devices is a movement, and a series of musical technologies, that listen back to people, to land, to history. Our technologies are designed in community, for community. We explore what musical tools can become when they are made with communities instead of imposed on them.
Traditional music technology has been shaped by extraction, gatekeeping, profit maximization and we refuse to replicate those systems. Our work is rooted in accessibility, decolonial frameworks, accessibility justice, diasporic knowledge, and the histories of those who have survived and created despite all attempts to silence them.
We reject technologies that erase history and culture, exploit and surveil people, and extract from communities. We stand against the erasure and exploitation of culture, land and labor. We refuse to let corporations and capitalism define the future of sound.
We firmly stand with liberation movements and with those who are fighting oppression and their oppressor.
We believe the future of sound is cooperative.
We are committed to building a model where community ownership replaces corporate extraction, where artists and technologists share resources and decision making power, and where creativity becomes a collective right rather than an individual privilege.
We believe technical & historic knowledge should be circulated openly and not be gatekept or privatized.
Electronic instruments should be accessible, open-source, and rooted in the realities of the people who use them. We share our schematics, codes, research, and failures because collective access builds collective power. We learn from our community as much as we build with them.
We understand that liberation is collaborative.
We refuse the myth of the lone genius. Our work emerges from the hands, voices, memories, and radical imaginations of the people who have shaped us — artists, educators, organizers, technologists, and everyday community members who care about building alternatives to extractive systems.
We believe sound is a technology of memory
A carrier of stories, survival, grief, joy, and truths institutions try to erase. We believe in sonic technologies you can feel, not just operate, because freedom is felt, not manufactured.
We build Sonic Liberation Devices because we know a new world is possible.
From Gaza to the Andes to the diaspora in Brooklyn, our technologies echo struggles that connect us all.
This is our commitment.
This is our practice.
This is our promise.
This is our collective vision of Sonic Liberation Devices.
And we invite you to build, imagine, and resist with us through musical rebellion.