ANDRÉS MONDACA SEPÚLVEDA

Composing with, without, and against the machine
Composer · Researcher · Educator

Chilean composer and researcher based in Mexico City.

He has written music in fairly different directions: three albums for children with Wachún, music for contemporary dance and theatre, a sound and video installation made from field recordings along a disused railway, and, earlier, acousmatic pieces programmed in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, France, Italy and Japan.

He now works on generative AI in popular music. He is completing a master's in Music Technology at UNAM, where he has developed a framework for describing what a machine contributed to a piece, presented at AIMC 2026 in Berlin, and he composes alongside the research, making pieces at deliberately different distances from the system. In 2024 he won the AI Song Contest with Onda Corta, and returned to it as a juror the following year.

He also teaches, at universities, cultural centres and museums, and has taught music of one kind or another since 2012. What he tries to pass on is less tool proficiency than a way of deciding how closely to work with a machine, and the habit of being able to say precisely what it did.

A good part of his work has been about talking music to people who are not musicians. He co-hosts La Coda, a podcast made with Bernarda Castillo whose second season is devoted entirely to music and artificial intelligence, and before that he made Cachivache Estéreo, a channel of music video-essays, and two series of radio capsules on artists from the O'Higgins region. For four years he visited public schools there with PAMN, the national music appreciation programme, introducing students to musicians working near them.

Mostly he is interested in what these systems leave out, what they flatten, and what happens when you don't accept their first answer.