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

From synthetic chemicals to synthetic financial products, the idea of synthesis has become common in both materials of our everyday and the ideas that shape, at a large scale, human culture. The recent emergence of chatbots powered by large language models has meant that technologies which can generate audio and video in addition to text based on a short prompt are now accessible to a wide user base.

The ERC-funded SYNCULTURE project asks how current signal processing techniques fit within a much wider history of synthetic media. It will offer a set of concepts, case-studies, interactive tools, and histories which clarify to the non-technical reader how the contemporary generative tools emerging from these technologies shape music and popular culture.

• 2026 / 10 Project website launched