The Online Program of events for the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Teaching Electronic Dance Music in Core Theory: Practical Applications and Critical Pedagogy
Time:
Thursday, 06/Nov/2025:
4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Boundary Waters Ballroom A-B
Session Topics:
Integrated: 90 minutes, SMT
Presentations
Teaching Electronic Dance Music in Core Theory: Practical Applications and Critical Pedagogy
Organizer(s): Jeremy Smith (The Ohio State University)
Chair(s): Hannah Benoit (McGill University)
Popular music is relatively common in the music theory classroom these days (Attas 2019; Biamonte 2010; Chenette 2017; de Clercq 2019; Oehler and Hanley 2009). However, electronic dance music (EDM, broadly construed to include house, trance, techno, dubstep, and more [Smith 2024, 106]) remains underrepresented despite its wide influence on the popular culture of our students. We believe this is not necessarily because instructors deny EDM’s significance, but more likely because of an anxiety of not being perceived as the “expert” in the room. Critical pedagogy harnesses this power imbalance and turns it into a positive: instead of lecturing as experts, we suggest centering students’ experiences, opinions, voices, expertise, and critical thinking skills through collaborative assignments, analyses, and discussions.
Through all these papers, we demonstrate that EDM exemplifies core music theory concepts and that curricula would be enriched by putting EDM in dialogue with other repertoires already being discussed. This in turn promotes engagement in our classrooms from a wider demographic of students who are interested in music outside of Western art music, which includes sample-based and DAW-based genres outside of EDM (especially hip-hop). Our papers model lesson plans that promote student empowerment and diversity with student-led learning, group work, collaborative assignments, and diverse repertoire examples. The underlying critical pedagogy principles of our session can ultimately be applied to teaching any genre, since critical pedagogy is not about content delivery, but achieving learning objectives. This special session is relevant to anyone interested in improving teaching practices that promote student engagement and success.
Presentations of the Symposium
Form in Electronic Dance Music: A Pedagogical Approach
Hannah Benoit McGill University
Electronic Dance Music (EDM) supports music theory students to gain a greater command of their knowledge of musical forms outside of Western Art Music, often asking students to analyze musical form without the use of notation. I will then demonstrate how EDM fits within a curriculum unit on musical form. I outline the scaffolding and structure of this example unit through the discussion of commonly used pop and EDM analytical techniques. By the end of this unit, students will be able to investigate how texture, timbre, and electronic effects contribute to the form of “Don’t Let Me Down” by The Chainsmokers, “Say My Name” by Odesza, “Helix” by Flume, and “Griztronics II (Another Level)” by GRiZ and Subtronics.
Students begin interacting with EDM formal paradigms after internalizing verse-chorus form (Nobile 2020; Summach 2011). EDM-pop offers an ideal stepping-stone towards analyzing EDM form because the genre similarly uses verse-chorus form but with the addition of dance chorus sections articulated by a riser–drop pairing (Barna 2020). Students become better prepared to attend to sonic functions as the primary vehicles of formal articulation in EDM once they become comfortable with the riser–drop pairing and common formal paradigms of EDM-pop. I then challenge students further by demanding critical thinking skills concerning how sonic functions elicit formal structures without the presence of pop-music formal song sections or lyrics. An upper-level music theory class can then discuss the limits of formal section labels and common resistance to these labels in EDM.
I offer a progression of increasing analytical difficulty to enrich students’ understanding of formal paradigms outside of Western Art Music. Crucially, EDM does not need to be studied in isolation; rather, educators can interweave EDM form with form of other genres, including universally taught classical forms. This paper centers students’ critical thinking skills to discuss and understand how producers and DJs create form using a variety of musical techniques idiosyncratic to the EDM genre. I propose a more inclusive learning environment grounded in critical pedagogy through the use of popular music genres and lack of musical notation in each analytical exercise.
EDM as Timbre Learning Lab
Megan Lavengood George Mason University
Timbre and texture remain persistently overlooked in undergraduate theory curricula. As a step toward remedying this, I show how to incorporate these topics through EDM, a style of music that eschews melodic and harmonic complexity and thus brings timbre and texture to the forefront of listener perception (Fales 2018). I provide resources and a sequence of critical-pedagogy-based lesson plans for teaching pop music texture and show how EDM songs can problematize and nuance our ideas about texture.
Timbre and texture are special: they are an inherent part of virtually any type of music. When students learn to listen for these musical domains, then, they learn tools for thinking deeply about all sorts of music—not just Western classical music, and not just EDM. Lessons like these support a central tenet of critical pedagogy by developing well-rounded and autonomous students.
Teaching Rhythmic Theory Through Electronic Dance Music
Jeremy W. Smith The Ohio State University
This paper equips instructors with lesson plans to teach rhythm and meter through electronic dance music (EDM) using critical pedagogy (Aybar and Kantarci Bingöl 2023). Several recent tracks will be discussed, along with classroom activities and assignments for analysis and composition in core theory. The tracks discussed exemplify concepts such as simple and compound meter, hypermeter, metrical dissonance, the tresillo and double tresillo rhythms (Biamonte 2014), and the rumba clave pattern. I articulate three reasons for teaching rhythm and meter through EDM: first, the concepts saturate even a single EDM track; second, EDM is based on loops that repeat and solidify the concepts; third, teaching EDM decenters the traditional music theory canon through inclusion of more contemporary music. For example, “Right This Second” by deadmau5 could be used to demonstrate compound quadruple meter, then returned to for a lesson on metrical dissonance, encouraging critical thinking and reflection through spiral learning.
Using EDM examples can also lead to discussions comparing how rhythm is used in various repertoires. To demonstrate, I provide lesson plans showing how “Dont Give it Up (Full Intention Remix)” [sic ] can be used to teach clave patterns and theories of groove. Students could be asked to transcribe rhythms or enter them into a DAW, then reflect on how clave patterns are used for different purposes in different genres. The examples in this paper illustrate how EDM provides clear and plentiful opportunities for teaching rhythmic theory, in a way that supports student empowerment and critical thinking skills.
