Musical Synthetic Media

The public debate around musical synthetic media has been dominated by moral alarm and naive realism: a framework of real versus fake, authentic versus inauthentic, that forecloses richer understandings of what these productions do and mean. Study 1 moves beyond this framing via a consideration of deepfake pop and its historical antecedents across popular and art music. Through three case studies, it asks what new skills, divisions of labour, and categories of music production arise when fans have access to their favourite musicians' likenesses; how fan-creators, named artists, and labels negotiate the boundary between cultural value and clickbait; and whether the metaphor of 'synthesis' better describes the techne of deepfake pop than sampling.

Case studies

Study 1a analyses anonymous producer Dae Lims' 2023 completion of the Beach Boys' unfinished 1967 album Smile. Already a cult classic, this synthetic-media production participates in a claim to authenticity rather than artifice, offering itself as a truer realisation of Smile's promise than the group's own efforts. Study 1a situates this against the longer history of fan-created Smile mixes, from cassette tapes in the 1980s to the web in the 1990s to generative AI in the 2020s.

Study 1b addresses the new aesthetics and citational practices around vocal cloning in hip hop. Where fan-producers and star musicians alike make use of vocal clones, Study 1b examines both amateur and professional instances, assessing how public opinion diverges across these cases and how moral, legislative, and political-economic forces shape the genre from within.

Study 1c asks how vocal cloning reshapes our understanding of the longer history of vocal synthesis. Beyond the canonical story of Homer Dudley's vocoder, Study 1c traces the many subsequent vocoders oriented toward natural-sounding speech rather than robotic effects, following these techniques from mid-twentieth-century corporate R&D to twenty-first-century browser interfaces. A key case study is Charles Dodge's Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental (1980), an understudied work that synthesized the vocal performance of opera singer Enrico Caruso using linear predictive coding.

Methods

Archival research, interviews and oral history, and practice-research. For study 1c, we will reconstruct the 1976 implementation of the linear predictive coding used in Any Resemblance, both to enable closer analysis of the piece and to illuminate vocal cloning's longer history.

Working bibliography

Reading for this study is being added as it proceeds.