The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America. By Theodore Gordon

Thirty years ago, Paul Théberge argued in a foundational study that the rationalization of the synthesizer industry tracks the aesthetics and ethics of middle-class material aspiration, just as Max Weber argued that the piano had done the same a century earlier (Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine (Hanover, NH, 1997)). Musicological studies highlight experimental uses of synthesis by ‘serious’ composers and academics, while the majority of demand comes from commercial film, video, and gaming studios. On one hand, synthesizers belong to a technoculture promising instrumental mastery over every aspect of sonic expression. On the other, the contemporaneity of this technoculture is complicated by the industry’s longstanding focus on revivals of devices and formats from the past and especially from a sentimentalized pre-digital golden age. Synthesizer players and designers see this reversal as justified by the tactility and contingency of analogue circuitry, or by the ‘surplus desire’ they associate with analogue programming interfaces. At a broader economic level, however, materially intensive hardware devices are also more conspicuous, demand higher prices, and become obsolete more quickly. Analogue synthesizers signal wealth, sophistication, and ‘liveness’ as opposed to ‘in the box’ software-based production, which bears the stigmas of amateurism, mechanical assistance, and poverty.