Onyx Ashanti

My work is concerned with artistic autonomy and cognitive optimization, at least partially modulated by sonomorphic logic. As of late, I have found myself perpetually preoccupied with answering the questions: What is music (within the western world/mind view) when it is not for an audience? Can I make music for myself while deprioritizing performance concerns and commercial success? What does such music sound like…feel like…taste like…? These questions generate rabbit hole matrices of new questions which I explore through my sonomorphic logic called MetaByte—a practice that explores biohacking by collecting bodily signals, sensations, and expressions through a self-designed exodermal suit, translating them into sound, light, and electrical outputs that turn the body into a sonocybernetic interface for generating new forms and meanings. This process builds an internal–external feedback loop, where bodily responses and outward expressions continuously inform one another, allowing new configurations to emerge.

Onyx Ashanti is a musician, programmer, inventor, instrument builder, and self-described “autonomous-expressor” known for his improvisational sound performances translated from gesture and movement. His focus on a continued and ever-deepening inquiry into sound and technology through biohacking or perceptual recalibration, which he calls Sonocybernetics, reflects a turn away from performance considerations and commerciality. A visionary technologist, Ashanti utilizes 3D printing and single-board computers (running Linux and Pure Data) to create gesturally controlled instruments, viewing Moore’s Law—the observation that the number of transistors on computer chips doubles every two years—as a hyperdimensional palette of “possibility textures.” 

Ashanti is known as the inventor of “beat jazz,” a musical system he developed over two decades encompassing live looping, jazz improvisation, and gestural sound design, created with an intention “to make the future rather than wait for it.” He has continued to expand upon beat jazz, with much of his practice now centering on his sonomorphic logic, “MetaByte,” a harmo-rhythmic pulsing protocol used to transduce information to and from his body using attached, self-designed exodermal mesh—worn like a second skin. The interfaces Ashanti wears, such as the [lox] construct—worn on his head and face—help him navigate social situations while also functioning as a light-based biohacking device that supports his metabolism through light and electrical stimulation. All of Ashanti’s inventions are directly inspired by the notion of jazz as an improvisational scientific protocol.

Ashanti has self-released dozens of albums and recordings, including Node:0-: initialization suite:(2013-2024) (2024), The Function Aesthetic; Volume 1 (2012), exploration (2011), and Recursive Artifact II: Nomadic Summer 2010 edition (2010). Much of their recorded output is non-standardized, consisting of live recordings, improvisational sketches, sonic diary entries and travelogues, “recursive artifacts,” and pieces that continue to evolve over time. As a method of examining the zeitgeist, Ashanti busks as a central mode of performance, posting many of their solo street performances to their YouTube channel. 

Ashanti has performed across Europe and North America, most recently at the Gray Area Festival in San Francisco, CA (2025) and Eyeo Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN (2019). He was the 2018 keynote speaker at The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), which gathers musicians and researchers from across the world to share knowledge on new musical interface design. Ashanti has also presented talks on his work at the NYU Waverly Labs for Music & Computing at New York University (2016), TEDx (2015, 2013, 2012, 2011), the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley, the World Maker Faire, Queens, NY (2011), among others. 

Ashanti remains drawn to subtle, quiet explorations with no one around, “trusting that when it is time to ‘sing’, the emergent ‘song’ will sing [him] and not the other way around.”