Aesthetics and Discourse

How do musicians, listeners, and critics talk about synthesised sound? Using natural language processing and critical discourse analysis techniques, Study 2 investigates the vernacular discourses of synthesis across different online genre- and practice-based communities, moving beyond both the pejorative language of cloning and fakery that dominates popular commentary and the engineering terminology that cordons off synthesis as a specialist domain.

Top-down taxonomies of listening in electronic music are abundant, from Pierre Schaeffer's Traité des objets musicaux to Denis Smalley's spectromorphology. Yet little research has examined the vernacular terms and metaphors through which musicians connect synthetic sound to particular musical worlds. This is a conspicuous gap, given decades of musicological work attesting to the shifts that synthetic sound brought to listener categories and expectations. The growth of prompt-based generative AI systems that synthesise sound from semantic cues suggests that a listener-led discourse for timbre has been functionalised even where it has been little analysed.

Case Studies

Text corpora are drawn from genre- and practice-based online discourse communities: listservs and forums engaging with synthesis and synthetic media across professional and hobbyist electroacoustic music, EDM, pop and alternative spheres. Analysing these enables the assembly of the lexical traits of synthesis among different groups, attending to how sounds, their control, and the perceived provenance and integrity of their sources are conceptualised, alongside interrogating how agency and authorship are negotiated and performed.

Methods

Natural language processing, topic modelling, critical discourse analysis.

Working bibliography

Reading for this study is being added as it proceeds.