After Sampling Culture: Synthetic media as culture in twenty-first century music

Synthetic media refers to the collective products of generative AI, whether text, video, photos, music, or sound. Through its 60+ year engagement with synthetic sound, from Harold Bode and Max Mathews in the late 1950s to deepfaked pop in the present, music stands to offer a unique, historically-grounded insight into synthetic media as culture.

SYNCULTURE is an ERC-funded research project that develops an integrated, empirically and historically grounded theory of synthesis culture for contemporary music and sound. Across a series of case studies addressing musical practices, discourse and terminology, theories of representation and modelling, engineering practice, and property and ownership, the project investigates the poetics, aesthetics, techné, and politics of synthesis.

• 2026 / 06 Project website launched