LITA: Building the Future of Liberatory Sound

Sound, for Lita, has never been decorative or aesthetic, but rather far more profound. It has always been a survival mechanism—a language of resistance, a keeper of memory, a way of holding onto histories that the world is adamant to erase. At 32, the Ecuadorian-American artist, DJ, creative technologist, and inventor has become one of the most uncompromising voices pushing to radically transform how music technology is imagined, built, and shared.

Lita’s work centres around her project Sonic Liberation Devices, an open-source ecosystem of community-built instruments designed with a clear purpose: to free sound from the violence of corporate extraction and institutional control. “My work started from a place of urgency,” she tells Dazed MENA. “A need to create musical tools that honour memory, resist erasure, and serve community.” For Lita, sound is not merely expressive. It’s political. It’s alive. It’s a site of struggle and of possibility.

Sonic Liberation Devices was born not in comfort but through confrontation. The New York City-based artist describes her defining moment as being doxxed, sanctioned, and punished for standing with Palestine. “Despite the institutional barriers, Sonic Liberation Devices became a movement embraced globally,” she reflects. “That moment defined not only my career, but also my direction, voice, and mission.” Her commitment to Palestinian liberation, SWANA creatives, and global resistance movements is embedded directly into the instruments she builds, the archives she protects, and the communities she organises alongside.

This transnational grounding is what gives her work its emotional charge. It merges regional sound traditions with tactical accessibility, symbolism from liberation movements, and community-shared archives. Even from Brooklyn, her work moves between Ecuadorian diaspora memory, Palestinian cultural survival, and the collective intelligence of educators, musicians, and movement workers. “I learn just as much from community organisers as I do from sound artists,” she says.

Her influences are rooted in community and the Global Majority, ranging from Palestinian steadfastness to Latin American abolitionist movements and the electronic music lineages from the Global South. She also draws from grief, joy, rage, tenderness—the emotional terrain of surviving systems built to silence us. “Sound is memory, and memory is power,” she says. “I’m fuelled by the urge to build sonic tools that serve people instead of institutions.”

Where others in music tech chase innovation for innovation’s sake, Lita places liberation at its core. She wants the future of sound to be community owned, politically conscious, decolonial, and accessible. “I want people, especially those historically excluded, to feel that technology belongs to them,” she shares. “I’m hoping to see creators across SWANA fully resourced, platformed, and protected, with artist-led infrastructures and archives that resist censorship and surveillance.”

It’s only natural, then, that her long-term vision is nothing short of structural transformation. Ultimately, the artist imagines Sonic Liberation Devices growing into a community ecosystem where instruments are collaboratively designed, circulated freely, and used to build movements as much as to make music. Next year, she’s expanding the project into a full series of instruments rooted in different political and sonic histories. She’s also producing her first hardware-based EP alongside new open-source tools, tutorials, and public events for the communities that have shaped her work, reminding us that sound itself can – and should – be a form of power.