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

Arising in recent years to refer to the collective products of generative AI, the concept of ‘synthetic media’ indexes the rise of a new world in which nothing of what we see or hear online is immune from being fabricated. Through its 60+ year engagement with synthetic sound, music stands to offer unique, historically-grounded insight into synthetic media as culture, thus moving beyond the naive realist and alarmist framing of real vs fake that dominates popular commentary. However, to date synthetic media has been misrecognised: either analysed as part of a disruptive wave of AI appearing from nowhere in the 2010s; or treated as a benign appendix to debates around sampling culture, themselves inherited from nearly a century of criticism on the status of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. SYNCULTURE develops richer, historically-sensitive methods of analysis to understand the cultural implications of synthesis as they cross mathematics, engineering, music, industry, and law. It does this, first, through an ambitious series of case studies that will 1) analyse synthetic media across art and popular styles; 2) develop a new analytical terminology, informed by vernacular discourse; 3) retheorise notions of representation and modelling in synthesis; and 4) develop the theory of synthesis culture for contemporary music. Second, through a novel interdisciplinary and mixed-methodology framework incorporating musicology, digital methods, and practice-research, and experimenting with collaborative methods for representing, interpreting, and deconstructing the terse formalisms of synthesis and signal processing. Termed the ‘slow digital humanities’, it will yield a critical reader on synthesis methods, having implications for both scholarship and pedagogy. With 4 early career, 2 established scholars, and a PI with 15 years experience working between the humanities, engineering, and arts, SYNCULTURE will develop a new critical paradigm for contemporary music.