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

Synthesis has become one of the master concepts of our time. Whether we are answering the phone or email, using social media, or streaming music and videos, we are increasingly faced with representations whose provenance could be synthetic. But how should we understand this synthesis that is permeating culture?

The ERC-funded SYNCULTURE project situates current signal processing techniques within a much longer history of synthetic media in music, from Max Mathews and Harold Bode in the 1950s, past the commercial synthesizer boom of the 1980s, and to deepfake pop of the present. The case of music can help us understand synthetic media in terms of its poetics, aesthetics, techné, and politics, moving beyond the naive realism of real vs fake that dominates popular commentary on deepfakes. Running from 2026-2031, SYNCULTURE will offer a set of concepts, case-studies, interactive tools, and histories to help understand generative AI as part of longer--and broader--history of synthetic culture.

• 2026 / 10 Project website launched