Timbre, Rhythm, and Texture within Music Theory’s White Racial Frame

This chapter discusses music theory’s neglect of EDM as it relates to the dominant methodologies of the field and Philip Ewell’s concept of the white racial frame, arguing that EDM is overlooked due to implicit biases against racial Otherness and against technological mediation, biases that runs deep enough in US culture to have impacted the trajectory of music theory as an academic field. The chapter examines unpitched percussion through analysis of performance, timbre, and texture in a Roland TR-909 drum machine “workout” performed by Jeff Mills. This analysis models one way that music theory might learn to take EDM seriously. By broadening the methodological toolbox, music theory can begin to course-correct and become more inclusive of music that challenges certain principles of Western music.

The Biopolitics of Synthesizers

This chapter outlines how the design of synthesizers and digital instruments in twenty-first-century EDM reflects a biopolitics of software that arises when sound and signal are analogized as dynamic bodies, and the core practices of music production center on the attempt to control, manipulate, and repair those bodies. Combining Tara Rodgers’ work on metaphor in audio-technical discourse and Robin James’s ideas about EDM and the sonic signatures of neoliberalism, this chapter argues that the intersonic control network of synthesizers—a modular, interconnected system of oscillating waveforms, filters, modulation envelopes, and effects—embodies fundamental shifts in the creative practice of electronic music production, the cultural economy of the music products industry, and the nature of labor in the software and media industries. The blurred lines between production and consumption, hardware and software, and labor and leisure define what the author calls the biopolitics of synthesizers. The author details three aspects of these biopolitics in this chapter, including the relationship between synthesizers and masculinity post-2008, synthesizer design and manufacturing as an agent of neoliberal capitalism, and the nature of commodity fetishism and gearlust in an era of plugins, sample packs, and other types of downloadable content.