The Synthetic Tide: Music, generative AI, and embodied inclusion in ocean literacy education

Technology is not a neutral tool but a sociomaterial actor that produces knowledge, relationships, responsibilities, and controversies. This raises a central question for teacher education: how can multimodal, place-based experiences involving generative AI be orchestrated while governing the ethical, ecological, and authorial tensions they generate? Within a research programme on Ocean Literacy, Human Governance, and teacher education at SUPSI, we address this question through a theoretically informed case vignette supported by exploratory evidence. The case builds on Un mare di corti, a place-based Ocean Literacy project recognised by the ArQus UNIPD Teaching Excellence Award (2022–2023), and centres on a National Sea Day public event with the Liceo "Concetto Marchesi" (Padua): a student orchestra of over ninety performers, an audience of about 800, and four AI-generated audiovisual works accompanying the live performance. The event set four bodies in relation: the conducting body, the performing bodies of the orchestra, the authorial body of the composer, and the disembodied generation of AI. In the central work, Mare d'inverno, composed by Andrea Manganaro, who lives with multiple sclerosis, an AI-generated video independently created by Piergiorgio Simoni as an interpretation of the composer's book and life, later approved by Manganaro, relayed an existing authorial voice into public space rather than substituting it. The event also generated controversy: some students challenged the use of AI on ethical, ecological, and artistic grounds, citing its energy footprint, the displacement of creative labour, and questions of authorship. We read these objections as constitutive voices of the event. An assembly to discuss them was envisaged but never took place; this missing deliberative space is the pedagogical core of the contribution. The corpus combines documentary analysis, diaries and interviews with the conductor and composer, autobiographical materials, and questionnaire data from 118 students, interpreted through an epistemology of listening. Preliminary findings suggest a perceived increase in students' attachment to the sea; given the retrospective, single-administration design, they are exploratory. The analysis draws on Ocean Literacy, place-based education, sociomaterial and post-digital perspectives, and Human Governance. The "synthetic tide" names the central paradox: the apparatus that strengthens affective connections with the sea is also experienced as ethically and artistically problematic. AI emerges as an ambivalent mediator, yet the case also shows a creativity distributed across actors and time, in which an educational value core is received, transformed, and passed on. The teacher's role is to steward this continuity rather than preserve fixed artefacts. A service-learning initiative in primary teacher education at the University of Padua, to be transferred to SUPSI DFA/ASP, now creates the deliberative space the case lacked: a facilitated assembly on the AI controversy and a critical mapping of the data, labour, and energy behind generative AI. Educating about the sea thus also means preparing teachers to hold together multimodal experience and the participatory governance of the controversies it opens.