Interview with Earrational Measures
by Valentina Orrù
29/01/2026
Earrational Measures is a collaborative project and a platform reimagining how data and stories are told and experienced through sound and music. Initiated by London-based drummer, percussionist, producer, and creative arts facilitator Anna De Mutiis, in collaboration with Madrid-based musician, sound artist, and researcher Pilo Moreno, Earrational Measures exposes detention economies and border regimes through data sonification. In 2025, Anna and Pilo co-produced 39 Alpha, 39 Bravo, the project’s first released audio piece. The track tells the story of profit and exploitation unfolding over 24 hours at Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre (near Oxford, UK) in 2016, the year that Pilo was detained there.
In this interview Anna De Mutiis talks about about Earrational Measures, the vision for the project, and the process behind the co-production of 39 Alpha, 39 Bravo.
How did Earrational Measures come about?
This project is the outcome of many years of experiences, conversations, and reflections. I worked for several years, between 2014 and 2020, inside UK immigration removal centres, delivering music workshops. During that time, I met many people, including some incredibly talented musicians. One of them was Pilo Moreno. I met him during a workshop; he was playing bass, we connected immediately and we kept in touch via email. When he was eventually released from detention, we met again, started jamming, formed a band, and collaborated creatively. At the same time, Pilo had been part of a group called Freed Voices, made up of people with lived experience of immigration detention who were actively speaking out about the realities of it. Through our conversations, we kept returning to the same reflections and questions that eventually led us to this project.
The UK is the only country in Europe where immigration detention has legally no time limit. When someone is detained, they don’t know if it will be for weeks, months, or years. That uncertainty is deeply harrowing. As Pilo and I talked more, the same question kept coming up: who is making money from this system, and how? Pilo noticed how little detainees were paid for work, the poor quality of food and clothing, and the overall sense of exploitation. It felt clear that profit was being extracted, but the mechanisms were hidden. Many of the contracts between the Home Office and private companies running detention centres are redacted under commercial confidentiality. Officially, it’s to protect competition, but in practice it makes it very difficult to know how much profit is being made. So, we decided we needed to ‘follow the money’.
What process did you follow for this investigative research on detention economies? And why using sound?
The process started in 2023 when I applied for a summer school in Ireland run by CREATE and Counterpoint Arts. The theme that year was collaboration between artists, investigative journalists, and digital activists. While applying, I came up with a project idea that involved using investigative methods to research the data behind the detention’s profit machine, while finding a way to expose it through sound in an ethical and collaborative way. The challenge was: is it possible to combine financial data, evidence of systemic violence and personal life stories while retaining the emotions and the central perspective of an expert-by-experience? Frustrated with mainstream media's decades-old habit of framing migrants as either criminals or objects of pity, sound offered a way to move beyond that framing, offering a different language for people to reassert their agency. Sound and music bypass academic and journalistic jargon, as well as linguistic barriers, that often prevents people with lived expertise from fully accessing and participating in these discussions. It’s visceral as it reaches the body and emotions, not just the intellect. And crucially, it creates space for people with lived experience to comment directly on data and become the data analysts themselves.
After the summer school, the idea evolved into a DYCP (Developing Your Creative Practice) Arts Council England funding. That grant gave me something invaluable: time. Time to train, to research, and to test whether the idea was actually workable. I studied investigative journalism through courses at the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ - Goldsmith), learned data analysis techniques, and received one-to-one mentoring from an investigative journalist. I also trained in data sonification with Loud Numbers Studio and learned the basics to use Sonic Pi (an open-source programming environment, designed for creating sounds with code). A key part of the work involved also obtaining primary data. I submitted a Freedom of Information Request to obtain the original 2010 contract between the government and Mitie, the private company running Campsfield House – the centre where Pilo was detained. It was initially rejected, and then it went through an internal review. After about six or seven months, I received it with names redacted, but with the financial details intact. Seeing those figures alongside Pilo was intense. The contract listed expenditures for healthcare, food, clothing which were things he directly experienced as severely lacking. The dissonance between the data and the lived reality was shocking.
How did you decide which data to use for 39 Alpha, 39 Bravo? And how did you translate that into sound?
I gathered a huge amount of data including company accounts, Home Office statistics, mental health reports, but through discussion with Pilo, we focused on one specific year: 2016, the year he was detained.
We calculated the maximum possible earnings for different roles: the company director, custody officers, and detainees. In that year, the highest-paid director earned around £280,000, custody officers earned roughly £40–45,000, and detainees, even working the maximum hours allowed, earned a few thousand pounds (max £3,000) per year at most (detainees are paid £1 per hour working inside detention). We decided to focus on that data but, instead of showing change across multiple years, which would flatten the disparity, we compressed 24 hours into four minutes. That way, you hear almost in real time how money accumulates differently for each role. For the director, we used a techno kick as a rhythmic baseline: the pulse of profit. Every £100 earned corresponds to a whip sound, which Pilo chose as to signal a recurring and ever-evolving form of modern-day slavery. For the custody officers’ income, he chose a Mario Bros-style coin sound for each pound earned: officers are part of the system, but are also at the very same time exploited, constantly chasing (an increase to their low) wages. For detainees, the sound took much longer to decide. Eventually, we settled on the sound of chains moving on the floor. Pilo chose this sound because it can be very similar to that of a bunch of coins falling on the ground. He argues that, in his experience, as you don’t know your release or deportation date, you might try to get a job to make some money inside the centre, but in this way the work chains you to that place, to that whole system. This choice of sound is for him a way to ask the question: when you earn £1 inside an Immigration Removal Centre after one hour of menial duties work, is it money or is it chains?
Can you talk more about the other ‘haunting’ sounds that can be heard throughout the track?
Yes. Some years ago Pilo and I ran some interviews with former detainees/experts-by-experience as we wanted to incorporate some quotes and ideas into our live music and, later, into a podcast. When we started asking about sounds they’d associate with detention, people repeatedly mentioned pigeons, airplanes, and especially the jingle of keys. Detention officers carry large sets of keys on their belts, and when they walk through the corridors in the morning to wake people up - you hear that sound constantly. Many people have told us that the jingling of keys stays with them long after detention. It becomes something your body reacts to instinctively, even when you’re not consciously thinking about it. One interviewee and activist told me that even years after his release, hearing keys in a supermarket once triggered him so intensely that he froze on the spot (you can listen to the podcast episode featuring this interview here).
I decided to include some of these recurring ‘sounds of detention’ in this latter project as rhythmic and textural elements, often panned and positioned through reverb and EQ at the very back of the space, creating something that is present, fading yet lingering. I was influenced by sociologist Avery Gordon’s concept of haunting as ‘the screaming presence of that which appears not to be present'*. These effects aimed to sonically include all those presences that cannot be grasped, fully understood, or explained, yet lurk and influence our past, present, and futures - both individually and collectively. I wanted to make space for what’s unsaid: the lost time, the alternative lives that never happened, the trauma that lingers. Playing with sound design carved some space for these 'ghosts' to exist and manifest themselves, and for us to - if we want to - hear them and acknowledge them.
We don’t have a single target audience. The piece can function as a short radio broadcast, a podcast, part of a campaign event, or an installation. It has already been used at an event opposing the reopening of Campsfield House, which feels far more important to me than exhibiting it in a prestigious art gallery. We're interested in letting the work find its own path through activism, radio, exhibitions, or collaborations with visual artists. What matters is that it’s ethically grounded and meaningful to the people involved.
How do you see data sonification informing your approach for Earrational Measures going forward?
I see data sonification used in a collaborative framework as the foundation of the project and the blueprint for this type of work to continue. Any dataset, may it be on climate change, housing, labour, borders, can be discussed and commented on by people who felt the burnt of it and live with its consequences. So, instead of specialists alone interpreting the data, people with lived experience become the data analysts. Informed by their lives, they choose what matters, how it sounds, and what it communicates. Through sound, data acquires an emotional layer carried by those who have lived it on their own skin, where embodied presence conveys experiences that numbers alone cannot hold. Sound opens a space for discussion between sterile numbers and everyday life whereby facts can be also ‘felt’ through sonic vibrations; it taps into a sphere that goes beyond intellect and hits the guts and speaks/sings to the skin. That, for me, is the political potential of data sonification and something which we’re planning to keep exploring in the future.
*Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. University of Minnesota Press.