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Conference Agenda

The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.

Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)

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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:08am EDT

Daily Overview

Session

Timbre, Technology, and Digital Musical Interface
Session Chair: Florian Walch, West Virginia University

Presentation 1

Presets and the Pleasure of Synthness, or, Why Not All 1980s Music Sounds the Same

Moira de Kok

Cornell University

The rapid infiltration of digital technologies into music production from the late 1970s onward irrevocably changed Western popular music. Presets, or pre-loaded sounds on synthesizers, were one such technology. Scholars claim that the ubiquity of the same presets across swaths of songs drives a perception of stylistic homogeneity in 1980s pop music (Lavengood 2019; Bennett 2019). However, simultaneously, the field of music production studies eschews technological determinism: that certain technologies exist does not mean they inevitably shape the way music sounds. What, then, is it about presets that drives the perception of homogeneity in 1980s pop music?

In this paper, I scrutinize what presets are and how, in the historical moment of their emergence, they crystallized several ongoing anxieties around technology in the Western popular music sphere. I analyze user manuals, advertisements, magazine articles, and musical recordings from the late 1970s and 1980s, focusing on two analog-digital hybrid synthesizers: the Polymoog and the Roland Juno-60. These case studies offer insights into the rise of presets and how they both upset and tried to accommodate an existing synthesizer paradigm that revolved around programming skill, analog tactility, and gendered authenticity.

I argue that presets highlight what I call synthness: the quality of sounding like a synthesizer, the essence of these novel instruments' strangeness. While presets’ synthness can lead to perceptions of homogeneity for listeners, I argue that for synth players, accessing synthness through presets can also be a source of immense pleasure centered on new and varied sounds and their possibilities. At their core, presets ask us to what extent, and why, we are (un)comfortable with having music pre-determined by an external, presumably machinic entity. The creeping rise of generative AI has made the fantasy of fully-automated music ever more real. Looking back to the rise of presets and digital music technology in the late 1970s and 1980s contextualizes the historical development of automatic music generation and the complex character of our anxiety around GenAI.