UCLA Nazir Ali Jairazhboy Colloquium
Amy Skjerseth - "From Dune's 'Desert Lady Voice' to DJ KSHMR's Sample Packs: Preprogrammed Music and Media Stereotypes"
If you have seen the Dune movies (scored by Hans Zimmer), or many movies with desert scenes in the past century of sound cinema, then you likely have heard the "desert lady voice": Hollywood filmmakers slap the sound of a woman singing a non-Western melody onto Middle Eastern landscapes. But the buck does not stop here; popular sample packs used by bedroom and studio producers alike continue to flood music, commercials, and media with this sonic stereotype. The immortalization and circulation of this musical and cultural default from Hollywood to TikTok is an example of a preset, or a default setting on technology. As I write in my new book, Preprogrammed: How Electronic Presets Changed Music and Media (University of California Press), presets can be found everywhere in modern music and media, as well as in even more quotidian objects, from microwave popcorn buttons and Instagram filters to your smartphone's predictive text. But while presets help us complete tasks and produce art quickly and efficiently, their design also reinforces economic, political, and social norms. In this talk, I employ capitalist, queer, and feminist critique to reveal how presets have reconfigured ways of seeing and hearing over the past century—from the popularization of the push-button car radio in the 1930s to the Auto-Tune era and the advent of AI. With examples from silent film music organs up to gallery-sized drum machines, I show how artists have coopted preset technologies to develop new forms of artistic and cultural expression, which urge us to reconsider the cultural and political systems we often take for granted.
Amy Skjerseth is Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the University of California, Riverside. She researches intersections of music, media, material culture, and technology. Her books include The Routledge Companion to Voice and Identity and Preprogrammed: How Electronic Presets Changed Music and Media (University of California Press). Her second monograph, in progress, centers feminist and queer approaches to the wall of sound.
If you are interested in reading Preprogrammed, here is an open access link to Skjerseth's book on the University of California Press webpage, and a flyer attached with a discount code for ordering a print copy.