Empathy, embodiment, and expanded auditory performance in the age of AI

This article explores empathy through experimental sound art and digital performance, drawing on over three decades of practice spanning industrial music, spatial sound, and biofeedback technologies. It asks how embodied listening can generate empathic encounters beyond visual representation and narrative identification. Focusing on EEG-driven installations and immersive multi-channel performances, including work with 4DSOUND and CMMAS, it examines how physiological data, spatialisation, and perceptual feedback loops create conditions for shared sonic presence. Machine learning and self-generative processes are considered as mediators of these encounters, with attention to their aesthetic potential and ethical limitations. Grounded in sound studies, affect theory, and critical posthumanism, the article develops sonic empathy as a situated, bodily, and relational process rather than a measurable emotional outcome. Its practice-as-research approach combines iterative biofeedback mapping, spatial composition, audience response, accessibility-led adjustment, and reflexive documentation. The discussion addresses algorithmic bias, sensory overload, unequal access, and the risks of affective manipulation. It argues that digital performance can support empathic listening when technological mediation remains intelligible, participation accommodates difference, and listeners retain agency in negotiating the encounter.