Conference Agenda

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.

What happens when the result of a performance on a musical instrument is not music? Over the last several years, music has been increasingly centered in speedrunning – the popular practice of playing video games as quickly as possible, typically in front of in-person or virtual audiences and often with constraints placed upon the player to make the game more difficult. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research to examine the intersections between music and speedrunning, focusing particularly on the use of musical instruments as video game controllers. When a musical instrument is substituted for a traditional video game controller, specific actions in the game are mapped to specific notes and articulations on, for example, a MIDI saxophone. Playing the game is thus performing on a musical instrument, where instead of sheet music there is a “route” – the speed-optimized path through the game, well-known to members of the community. Just like a violinist playing a Bach partita, speedrunners are evaluated on the fidelity of their performance to the route and judged as virtuosic based on not only their fluency with the route but also their ability to artistically improvise within it. It can be tempting to read these practices as “misuses” of musical instruments for non-musical purposes; the outcome is not clearly musical, after all, as this is not the skeuomorphic mapping of a musical instrument-shaped controller onto an in-game musical performance that is found in games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero (Miller 2012, Moseley 2013). Drawing on scholarship theorizing musical instruments as media interfaces (Dolan 2012, Moseley 2016, Rehding 2019), theories of video game play as performance (Fernandez-Vara 2009, Huuhka 2020, Travinor 2017), and the burgeoning academic literature on speedrunning (Hope 2023, Schmalzer 2024, Scully-Blaker 2016), I argue that we should instead learn from the ways that speedrunners themselves discuss gameplay in musical terms. By viewing gameplay as itself musical, we can better understand not only the aesthetics of speedrunning performances but also expand ongoing debates over the ontology of music itself.

Christian Worship Music (CWM) is one of the fastest-growing genres in the United States, and around half of all Protestant churches sing it regularly in services. Led by the “big four” megachurches of Bethel, Hillsong, Passion, and Elevation, CWM is marked by a distinct sound and style that affectively moves worshippers from around the world in their public and private relationship with God.

Although published scholarly accounts of CWM rarely mention it, no timbre is as central to the sound of CWM as the “pad” (short for synth pad), a synthesized drone on a tonic note or chord that continues throughout an entire song, and often lingering before and after. “Pads” are not played by instrumentalists, but are tracks activated by a click of a button on a synthesizer, phone application, or guitar pedal. The “pad” and its washy, major mode ambient textures are present in almost all of the top songs in the genre from the past fifteen years. In spite of its timbral centrality to CWM, the “pad” has received little to no scholarly attention; it was omitted from the 2025 special issue of the Yale Journal of Music & Religion titled “The Power of Timbre in Religion.”

Drawing on frameworks from critical organology (Dolan 2012, Moseley 2016), I argue that while the “pad” is less than an instrument and more than merely a timbre, it is best understood as an interface by which people engage with the practice and genre of CWM. Like the keyboard, I argue the form and shape of the “pad” as a technology has shaped the development of style, musical practice, and experience within this genre. I also argue the “pad” influences pedagogy, theology, and the textures, instrumentation, and formal trajectory the genre is known for. Because of the slipperiness inherent to timbre, especially one so difficult to hear and not connected to the gestures of a musician, its influence goes mostly unnoticed. Analysis of repertoire, popular performances, digital ethnography, and mixing interfaces position the “pad” at an exciting juncture of sound studies, space, affect, timbre, religion, and technology in popular music.