Behind the Glass: The Algorithm, the Human, and the Resistance

The genesis of this album wasn't a jam session or late-night melody…it was a spreadsheet. Or more precisely, a machine learning model.

In conjunction with my musical training, I have been pursuing my PhD at TU Berlin, with research focused on how machine learning is used to quantify, analyze, and shape public perception. Learning how technology is used in social media, marketing, and politics, to not only mirror society, but as means of creating a distorted reality shaped by profit incentives and control mechanisms has greatly influence the tone of this album. The deeper I got, the more clearly I saw the invisible scaffolding behind human interaction: algorithms categorizing emotions, behaviors, and relationships into marketable units.

That realization hit hard. We’re not just users anymore, we are the data, product, and content creators all at once. This new album is my response. It’s a protest record, though not in the traditional sense. There are no obvious anthems or slogans. Instead, we’ve created a soundscape that moves between confrontation and introspection, capturing the tension between lived experience and algorithmic prediction. Songs unfold like systems being hacked from the inside…glitches in the matrix, moments of defiance.

There’s a track on the album where we sampled the actual sonification of data — emotional metrics mapped onto synth parameters. It’s eerie, how predictable our collective moods have become when charted. And it’s horrifying, how that predictability is being used against us. But this album isn’t about fear. It’s about awareness. About resistance. About asking what it means to be human when everything we feel is being measured, filtered, and fed back to us.

Music is one of the last unfiltered mediums left. That’s why this record matters. It isn’t just a release. It’s a warning. It’s a reckoning. It’s a call to remember the raw, unsellable core of who we are as humans.