Towards Synthesis Culture

Why has synthesis proven so fertile a concept across its many disciplinary moorings, from philosophy to music, chemistry, signal engineering, and finance? What political-economic conditions rendered synthesis one of the twentieth century's key cybernetic concepts, and what makes it an even more consequential one in the twenty-first? Study 6 traces the displacements, transformations, and bifurcations that synthesis and its associated terms have undergone across a 200+ year history as they cross fields, disciplines, and practices.

As a jumping-off point for the theorisation of synthesis culture, Study 6 provides a transdisciplinary, historical, and mixed-mode mapping of synthesis and its plural interfaces, methods, models, and techniques. It is a critical etymology that takes as its object keywords normatively defined as technical rather than cultural: synthesis, sampling, and their attendant methods of signal processing. Beyond critical reflection, Study 6 aims to intervene in synthesis's discourse in order to re-theorise synthetic media beyond the pejorative. What metaphors, ideas, and imaginaries are in play when musicians and other cultural producers set about synthesising worlds? If sampling implies an orientation to cultural objects that has been theorised as postmodern or digital-utopian, what does a synthetic or synthesising orientation imply?

The Synthesis Handbook

The major output of Study 6 is The Synthesis Handbook: an interactive website designed for classroom, workshop, and other pedagogical settings. The Handbook offers an interpretive and historical take on signal processing, addressing its poetics, politics, and aesthetics via annotated interactive applets, interviews, and other media. It is the collective output of the entire project, synthesising findings from Studies 1 through 5 into a free, open-access resource.

Approach

Considering the communal reality of synthesis across fields and boundaries, Study 6 serves as a testbed for the project's slow digital humanities methodology. Reading groups, workshops, hands-on activities, and invited provocations are open to scholars, musicians, and students across arts, engineering, science, and the music technology industry. Experiments with representation, explanation, annotation, and critique feed into the Handbook.

Throughout the project, monthly workshops and experimental fora convene the team, advisory board, and an international group of engineers, humanists, and practice-researchers. These forums experiment with methods to chronicle, explain, analyse, deconstruct, and critique synthesis and signal processing, examining mathematics, circuit designs, interfaces, business models, IP, commercial contracts, performance techniques, and poetics. A major international conference, After Sampling Culture, is held in Year 5.

Working bibliography

Reading for this study is being added as it proceeds.