MODES OF WORLDING IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC:

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Introduction

Music is often discussed in terms of worlding, perhaps especially in the context of electronic music. But what kinds of worlds are being auditioned and what logics underlie their formation? Further, how do specific techniques and technologies contribute to these processes? In this essay, I propose three primary modes of worlding in electronic music: referential, morphogenetic and speculative. Of course, many artists and genres make use of multiple approaches, sometimes within the same performance or composition. Broadly speaking however, referential practices tend to privilege a logic of recontextualisation, morphogenetic practices are driven by material transformation, while speculative practices involve generative creation. All three utilise transduction to actualise these logics and bring sonic worlds into being. Transduction here refers not only to the conversion of one form of energy into another, but the broader co-constitutive relationship between material, technology, human and contextual milieu. I make no value distinction between these three modes and instead aim to consider the particular affordances of each approach.

I hope that identifying some of the philosophical orientations behind the music discussed will help contend with the dominant tendencies in contemporary music production. Rather than emulate surface-level characteristics, we might take inspiration from this music in a less literal sense. The spectral philosophy of dub, for example, has been applied well beyond the realm of reggae, while the psychotropic approach to stretching and slowing audio can be found everywhere from chopped-and-screwed hip-hop to minimalist drone. While these musics undeniably emerged within specific historical and cultural contexts, they show us something important about how genuine innovation has often come from engaging more deeply with process. This can be contrasted with a current proclivity towards efficiency, optimisation and imitation, where producers utilise tools such as YouTube tutorials, sample packs and generative AI to reach predetermined outcomes more quickly. It is perhaps unsurprising that this has had a homogenising impact on cultural production, despite the positive impact of accessibility. This is not to say that these kinds of tools can’t be used more creatively, but is rather a commentary on the underlying logic that often animates their application.

There are of course notable reasons why the exploratory pathways that allow for unexpected and exciting results have been increasingly bypassed. In Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher laments how increased privatization and institutional decline have eroded the conditions that enabled the popular modernism of the 20^th century - from cheap rent, to free education and adventurous public broadcasting. He yearned for a time when popular music constantly reinvented itself, claiming that the 21^st century had seen a stagnation in the collective imagination.² Rather than support the emergence of new cultural forms, he argued technology was being used primarily to refurbish the old through vague allusions to the past, often without reference to a specific time period. This cultural conservatism relates to a phenomenon he called ‘capitalist realism’, or in other words the pervasive sense that there is no viable alternative to capitalism and that the future had been slowly cancelled.³ Contrary to common misinterpretation, he was not claiming that this sense was correct or inevitable, but rather that contemporary capitalism has given rise to a ‘reflexive impotence’ that both shapes and is reinforced through cultural production. This impotence also describes the dominant experience of political agency, at least within the imperial core. One can debate the extent to which this diagnosis was overly pessimistic, or the result of a uniquely British perspective, but it is difficult to ignore the presence of objective material conditions that make experimental popular culture less likely today.

These conditions not only impact how culture is produced, but also how it is circulated and consumed. The exchange value of music has declined significantly in this century, to the point where buying recorded music is largely a marginal practice. If consumers do pay, it is typically for access rather than ownership via streaming platforms like Spotify. Only a small percentage of artists receive any meaningful income from these platforms and exchange value instead derives predominantly from ancillary revenue streams such as ticket sales, merchandise, licensing deals, and brand partnerships. In this context, recorded music effectively becomes a cost of production, rather than a primary commodity.⁴ There is consequently a material incentive to minimize this cost, which reinforces the broader drive towards efficiency, optimisation and imitation. As critics such as Liz Pelly have pointed out, these platforms have also influenced the use value of music.⁵ Increasingly, consumers engage with music through curated playlists organised around particular moods and activities. For many, this has resulted in listening habits which are passive and functional, in turn creating a demand for bland, frictionless music.⁶ This has not been helped by the fact that recommendation systems generally privilege music that is already legible within existing patterns of classification.

These dynamics also intersect with the algorithmic pressures of social media (which incentivise accelerated production cycles to feed continuous engagement) and the corporate consolidation of live performance infrastructure (which institutionalise a conservative preference for proven, scalable success). Despite the fact that it has never been easier to produce, release and access music, these are not fertile conditions for experimentation. It almost goes without saying that the best way to overcome cultural stagnation would be to structurally intervene in the material relations that shape production, circulation and consumption. Nonetheless, I believe there is still utility in identifying these philosophical orientations and that thinking about music in these ways can help to loosen the grip of inevitability. They remind us that alternative logics of cultural production persist, even though necessarily constrained by the totalising structure of capitalism. While such logics are unable to directly transform the material relations that condition them, they can be harnessed to create work that does not simply reproduce the inertia of the present, but can perhaps gesture beyond it. In this sense, I agree with Fisher that culture holds the power to expand our perception of possibility, to reveal what was once, or could be, otherwise. Whether this can then be translated into structural change in the sphere of political economy however is another question.

Individuation

Given my focus on electronic music, I want to begin by considering the role that electricity plays in relation to each approach using Simondon’s theory of individuation.⁷ In the case of synthetic music, electricity functions somewhat as an undifferentiated field of energetic potential. This potential is individuated through a process of transduction, in which human and machine collaborate to generate and shape waveforms through a signal chain of oscillators, filters and envelopes. In analog synthesis, this involves physical circuits that convert and modulate electrical energy directly, while in digital synthesis the process is mediated algorithmically through discretisation and abstraction.⁸ While this process is conditioned by things like technical architectures, interface design and compositional conventions, I nonetheless contend that synthetic music is particularly well-suited to engage in speculative worlding because it is relatively unconstrained by prior individuation. Morphogenetic worlding, on the other hand, involves source material that has already been transduced through recording technology - whether this be a field recording or a sample drawn from existing music. When such artefacts are transformed through human-machine collaboration (pitch-shifting, time-stretching etc), electricity participates in further individuation, rather than the generation of sound. A similar process occurs in referential practices, however under this approach new phases of individuation can be understood mostly as relational, rather than material, transformation. Or in other words, electricity contributes to shifts in how the artefact is situated, interpreted or experienced within a broader compositional or cultural context, without significantly altering the underlying sonic material.

This does not mean however that morphogenetic worlding can be reduced to internal changes, or that referential worlding can be reduced to external changes. Or that one is concerned only with sonic materialism, while the other is restricted to social signification. Under a Simondonian conception of individuation, the two cannot be separated and perturbations in one necessarily impact the other. To help understand this we can consider how the sampled breakbeat from soul, funk and jazz records has been individuated differently across genres. In early hip-hop subgenres such as boom-bap, the breakbeat was typically looped with minimal processing and used as the rhythmic foundation of the track. This is a referential act, drawing on collective memory and signalling lineage, reverence and crate-digging knowledge. The sampled breakbeat in 90s jungle on the other hand, was chopped, filtered and accelerated beyond human playing capacity. Referentiality might still be legible, but it is ultimately subordinated to a process of morphogenesis. Here, the material and technology is the same, but the intention and technique differ significantly. In the boom-bap example, the process of individuation emerges through changes to the milieu (recontextualisation within a new genre), however the sample nonetheless acquires a new function and identity through its repositioning (from short transitional measure, to cyclical foundation). Conversely, in jungle, the breakbeat undergoes intense material transformation, which is accompanied by corresponding shifts in affective and cultural resonance. This dynamic interplay is critical to individuation and it is important to remember that the individual and the milieu are intrinsically connected, evolving together in an ongoing process that involves partial resolution of tensions within a metastable system.

There is a long history of music I would consider morphogenetic that has been framed in terms of abstraction. The early musique concrète experiments led by Pierre Schaeffer, for example, sought not to represent the world around him, but rather to abstract sound from its origin entirely.⁹ The introduction of magnetic tape meant that recording was no longer limited to the reproduction of live performance, but could instead be spliced, resequenced, reversed, sped-up or slowed down, offering endless opportunities for sonic mutation. This was intended to facilitate what Schaeffer called ‘reduced listening’, here attention is oriented toward the intrinsic qualities of the sound, rather than its source or meaning.¹⁰ This also resonates with the ambition of John Cage to ‘let sounds be themselves.’¹¹ More recently, Kodwo Eshun echoed this sentiment in More Brilliant Than The Sun, where he framed both the ‘synthetic fiction’ of Detroit techno and the ‘rhythmic psychedelia’ of UK jungle as posthuman abstractions under an ‘alien discontinuum.’¹² But while morphogenetic music doesn’t “locate you in tradition” in the way that referential worlding might, I don’t think it is quite right to say that it fully “dislocates you from your origins.”¹³ Contrary to Schaeffer and Eshun, I believe that no matter how extensively sonic material is transformed, it continues to bear a residual trace from prior individuation. In the case of 90s jungle, while breaks were mutated almost beyond recognition, they also carried a rich rhythmic genealogy that reverberates through the diasporic networks of the ‘Black Atlantic.’¹⁴ The “dead inhabit the offbeat, and the spirit rides hard upon riddim.”¹⁵

Each approach offers a distinct mode of worlding and it is worth considering the specific affordances of all three. My recent project Can You Hear Invisible Worlds?, for example, involved transformation of a bat echolocation recording primarily using granular and spectral synthesis. This constitutes morphogenetic worlding, where the source material is extensively reconfigured yet retains a trace of its origin, which continues to inform the conceptual basis of the work. If I were engaging in referential worlding, I might aim to preserve the sonic qualities of the recording entirely and instead focus on compositional strategies such as arrangement and spatialisation. This would also be a legitimate approach, but would likely serve more of a documentary function. Speculative worlding, on the other hand, might involve generating material via physical modelling or wavetable synthesis that is only indirectly informed by the original recording, or alternatively by using subtractive, additive, or FM synthesis to produce new sounds perhaps only loosely inspired by bat echolocation. This shows how the same subject can take on different affordances depending on ontological approach. Speculative worlding is uniquely positioned to generate new imaginaries, morphogenetic worlding can reveal latent potentials within existing material, and referential worlding has the power to reconfigure relational meaning.

None of these approaches can be severed from historical, political or cultural context however and technical mediation is never neutral. Because the individual and the milieu are given equal weight by Simondon, I believe his theory offers an alternative to the recent ontological turn within sound studies, which can sometimes fall into “being-without-sociality.”¹⁶ This is perhaps most overt in sonic arts practices, where there is often exclusive concern for the physical properties of sound, with little or no consideration of context. Despite claims to the contrary, this is not an anthropocentric assertion that sound does not exist outside of human perception, but rather that any account of its ontological condition is unavoidably shaped by the historically situated ways in which it is known.¹⁷ As noted by Sally-Jane Norman, a complete focus on abstract materiality is “thwarted in practice by our prior awareness of real sounds in changing contexts that play into our hearing.”¹⁸ In addition to these more subjective considerations, there is also the fact that the technologies employed in sound production and reproduction are themselves encoded with historically and culturally specific epistemic frameworks. This is evident in how digital audio workstations are typically grounded in Western European music theory, but also in recording technology itself, which is predicated on an understanding of sound as a detachable object that can be cleanly extracted from its environment.¹⁹ These encodings structure rather than determine what is produced however, and many artists have subverted embedded epistemologies through deliberate misuse of technology.

Failure to acknowledge these realities points to the need for a resituation, rather than outright rejection, of ontological concerns in the context of sound. For just as ‘being-without-sociality’ is inadequate, so too is the reduction of music to its milieu. This reduction is what Eshun was ultimately pushing against and, while I think he went too far in the other direction, I agree that approaching music through the lens of form and material can lead to interesting insights. Sonic nature, in other words, must be brought into dialogue with sonic culture. This insistence is reflected in my selection of examples discussed below.

Referential Worlding

I will begin by looking at some examples of referential worlding, namely those that loosely fall under plunderphonics, field recording practices, and hybrid formations that incorporate traditional instrumentation. In particular, I will examine the sampled breakbeat within early hip-hop, the environmental field recording of Chris Watson, and the taonga pūoro infused club tracks of Mokotron. These practices can reconfigure relational meaning through the recontextualisation of sonic material, perhaps disrupting established narratives and prompting fresh associations. This might involve challenging proprietary notions of authorship and drawing attention to that which exists beyond the dominant frame.

- Plunderphonics

Plunderphonics is a term first coined by John Oswald in his essay, Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative.²⁰ It refers to the act of taking audio from existing recorded music and repurposing it within new compositions. While some of Oswald’s own output could be described as morphogenetic, it is predominantly referential in approach.²¹ His album Plexure for example consists of extreme use of collaged ‘electroquotations’, where small fragments of popular music are layered in quick succession, rather than materially transformed.²² Oswald maintains that a sample must be identifiable in order for it to qualify as a plunderphone, partly to enable a critique of copyright. He advocates for the right to actively participate in, rather than simply passively consume, popular culture - an approach that endures in the endless remixing found on TikTok, as well as recent internet microgenres such as Dariacore. To this end, Oswald is also interested in how technologies intended for playback have been subversively repurposed for creation.

This subversion is clearly evident in early hip-hop, where the breakbeat from funk, soul and jazz records was often looped and used as the rhythmic foundation. This signified evolution, but ultimately continuity in African-American musical tradition. While these loops retained their sonic quality and cultural resonance, they also went from being short transitional measures within linear compositions to taking on a prominent cyclical function, where the “end of the phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with the beginning.”²³ This imparted a “new compositional logic to preexisting material” and changed “the entire sensibility within which this sound is interpreted.”²⁴ Initially, this technique was achieved through vinyl playback, where DJs such as DJ Kool Herc extended the break using two turntables while MCs rapped over the beat. Once affordable digital hardware samplers such as the E-mu SP-1200 and Akai MPC60 came onto the market however, these became the preferred method. This shift in technology also helped to facilitate a change in technique, where breaks were increasingly chopped and rearranged by producers such as J Dilla, rather than looped in their entirety. These practices posed a powerful challenge to capitalist notions of individual authorship, reclaiming archival material within a shared lineage as the foundation for communal experience.


- Field recording practices

Another good example of referential worlding can be found in field recording practices. While some artists subject recordings to extensive manipulation, many prefer to adopt a more veridical approach. Sounds that often go unnoticed in everyday life are foregrounded through their recontextualisation, encouraging deeper attunement to our surroundings. This is often the case with environmental field recording, which frequently includes sounds that are unfamiliar or inaccessible to the listener. Among the most notable practitioners is Chris Watson, who has recorded material in remote locations around the world, including for wildlife documentaries narrated by David Attenborough. Watson is particularly drawn to sounds that cannot be heard by humans without the assistance of technological mediation. His track Vatnajokull (2003), for example, consists of hydrophone recordings made within the crevasses of a melting glacier in Iceland.²⁵

Much of his work seeks to draw attention to the diversity of life that unfolds beyond anthropocentric perception, sometimes with implicit reference to the impact of human activity on complex ecosystems. To help achieve this, Watson increasingly makes use of spatial audio technology, such as ambisonic microphones for recording and multi-channel speakers for playback.²⁶ These technologies enable a more immersive listening experience, allowing the thematic content of the work to be registered somatically, rather than being processed solely at an intellectual level. I would argue that this immersion also serves to reinforce our interconnectedness within these ecological systems, which imperial capitalism has worked to obscure and suppress. Finally, it is worth noting that even attempts to achieve high “reality credibility” are always filtered through the technology and decisions such as where to record, what sounds to include, and how to frame or present the work. They are not, nor do they claim to be, objective representations of reality.²⁷

- Hybrid formations

The final example of referential worlding I will discuss is hybrid formations that incorporate traditional instrumentation. While there is generally an underlying emphasis on preservation, these practices often seek to engage living residual potentials rather than wholly emulate past cultural forms. A local example of this approach can be found in Mokotron, who adds taonga pūoro to established genres such as dub, drum and bass, and electro. As explained by Ruby Solly, taonga pūoro “hold a deeper significance beyond their musicality”²⁸ and were traditionally recognised as “having spiritual relevance and power.”²⁹ Knowledge of this power however was fractured by colonial processes, including the Tohunga Suppression Act, which prohibited practice between 1907 to 1962. While the 1980s saw an eventual renaissance, Rob Thorne identifies how a large part of reviving the traditions of taonga pūoro has necessarily come out of the “combination of actual and re-imagined tradition and innovation.”³⁰ These improvisatory exercises seek to retain and reconstruct the old, while utilising the new, he says.

Accordingly, when taonga pūoro is incorporated within hybrid compositions such as those produced by Mokotron, it arguably becomes what Ambrose Field refers to as a ‘transcontextual agent’.³¹ Field asserts that these agents can effectively “lend old or existing contexts new meanings”³² and “change the space within which they are placed.”³³ In this case, transcontextuality might allow for traditional associations to be layered with newer connotations relating to reclamation of Māori identity and culture, for example. A reclamation made all the more powerful in a political climate marked by repeated attacks on Māori rights to collective determination. This also resonates with Carl Mika’s insistence that indigenous knowledge be brought together with broader counter-colonial thought,  perhaps especially given the formats being incorporated into often have their own histories of resistance. These kinds of hybrid contributions help to sustain the vitality of club music, while also raising concerns around risk of decontextualisation, commodification and appropriation by others.³⁴

Morphogenetic Worlding

Like referential worlding, morphogenetic practices involve material that has already been individuated through recording technology. While this material is often similarly recontextualised, it is also transformed. For this section, I will consider examples that draw out latent potentials through material mutation, parametric translation, and processes of decay. These examples exist within a space between referentiality and speculation, allowing us to hear the familiar in unfamiliar ways. No matter the extent or method of their morphogenesis, all still bear the trace of prior individuation in a way that meaningfully distinguishes them from speculative practices.

- Material mutation

Perhaps the most common approach to morphogenetic worlding is when the waveform is acted upon directly and recorded sound is treated as malleable material that can be stretched, compressed and otherwise mutated. Technologies used to support these practices have evolved over time, from tape machines and turntables, to hardware samplers and digital audio workstations. Across this lineage, manipulating the temporal and spectral qualities of sound has remained a key technique, from early avant-garde experimentation, to chopped-and-screwed hip-hop, vaporwave resampling and pitched-up nightcore. More recent developments such as granular and spectral synthesis have expanded these possibilities, enabling increasingly fine-grained intervention. These technologies can reveal latent qualities that are not readily apparent or accessible in the original recording. Practices employing such technologies therefore have the capacity to precipitate alternative modes of perception by reconfiguring the internal structure of sonic material. They might invite us to engage from a different vantage point and augment our sensorium through adaptation, staging trans-scalar encounters that “open up the possibility of our being remade at other scales.”³⁵

As alluded to earlier, jungle provides a vivid example of morphogenetic worlding. To begin with, producers mutated salvaged drum breaks through digital hardware samplers such as the Akai S950, which offered more advanced editing capabilities than those typically used in early hip-hop.³⁶ Crucially, the S950 could time-stretch a sample without changing its pitch, a technique which was then creatively pioneered by producers such as Goldie, 4hero, and A Guy Called Gerald. This decoupling meant that sped-up breaks could effectively maintain their original timbre, in contrast with early hardcore music where acceleration produced a thinner, more brittle quality. Further, the grainy metallic artefacts generated by time-stretching became a hallmark of the jungle aesthetic. Increased memory capacity also enabled more forensic drum programming, or what Eshun refers to as ‘breakbeat science.’³⁷ Breaks could be spliced into ‘genes’, enabling producers to go deeper and “look at music through a microscope.”³⁸ These fragments were often resampled repeatedly, with many generations of the same sample being layered into dizzyingly dense ‘hyperrhythmic psychedelia.’ Eshun argues that this had the impact of opening up a “possibility space of hypersensation”³⁹ where the body teeters “on the brink of a new speech” and is “mutated limb by limb.”⁴⁰ In this sense, jungle did not simply transform the breakbeat, but effectively unleashed its hidden kinaesthetic potential.


- Decay

The second example of morphogenetic worlding is processes based around decay and decomposition. These practices challenge positivistic conceptions of ontology, reminding us that morphogenesis is not only about growth and emergence, but also negation and subtraction. As articulated by Louis Chude-Sokei, “if sound is birth and silence death, the echo trailing into infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history.”⁴¹ Rather than adding or layering then, these practices foreground presence through absence, either by allowing material to corrode over time or by stripping away certain elements. This approach is best encapsulated in Jamaican dub, where producers removed the lead vocal and certain instrumental parts from existing reggae tracks and heavily reverberated the skeletal remains. Dub producers such as Lee 'Scratch’ Perry pioneered the use of the mixing desk as an instrument, making audible the ‘re’ of recording that had previously been repressed.⁴² As explained by Ian Penman, dub uprooted false notions of “uncorrupted temporality”, simultaneously reflecting both memory and futurity.⁴³ A “form of magic” that makes people disappear, “leaving behind only their context, their trace, their outline.”⁴⁴ This lingering presence could be understood as a refusal to be silenced in the face of forced displacement.

Echoes of this spectral philosophy can be found in the hauntological music produced by the likes of Burial and The Caretaker. Fisher discusses the shared ‘existential orientation’ of this music, which is often concerned with loss, not only in relation to the past, but also the associated futures that never eventuated.⁴⁵ Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom, for example, featured degraded samples from early 20th century ballroom music to evoke themes of deterioration and nostalgia.⁴⁶ The distorted crackle signals a time ‘out of joint’, a static that intensifies over the course of The Caretaker’s subsequent albums to the point where the problem is no longer the “longing to get to the past, but the inability to get out of it.”⁴⁷ Burial, meanwhile, explores this sense of broken time in relation to the failed utopian promise of 90s UK rave culture, dismembering the music of this era into a ghostly “tissue of traces.”⁴⁸ Fisher insisted however that the melancholia expressed by these artists “constitutes a refusal to give up on the desire for the future” because it demonstrates a “failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism.”⁴⁹


- Parametric translation

The final example of morphogenesis is something I have termed parametric translation, in which recorded sound is transformed not through mutation or decay, but by conversion into another representational system. Rather than being deformed or eroded, sonic material is translated into a set of parameters that can then be rematerialised through synthesis. This might involve subjecting recordings to machine learning processes or audio-to-midi transcription, where midi information relating to rhythm, harmony or melody is extracted and redeployed in new compositions. While this approach operates at a higher level of abstraction than other kinds of morphogenetic worlding, it is distinct from speculative practices because the process remains grounded in existing sonic material. This can be contrasted with algorithmic composition, for example, which uses abstract formal systems to establish the generative conditions of sound creation.

This approach is exemplified in Debit’s album The Long Count, which harnessed machine learning techniques to develop a set of digital instruments based on the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.⁵⁰ Ancient Mayan wind instruments are technosymbiotically⁵¹ reconceived in a collection of otherworldly microtonal compositions, reanimating ancestral technology from a pre-colonial past that has been intentionally erased and must be reconstructed through imagination. While there are legitimate reasons to be wary about the introduction of machine learning into musical processes, her work demonstrates how such technologies can also be reappropriated to facilitate the morphogenetic extension of cultural memory and “open a new space of artistic possibility beyond the algorithmic monoculture of AI slop.”⁵²

Speculative Worlding

The final mode I would like to discuss is speculative worlding. This approach involves the creation of sound without direct reliance on already individuated sonic material, making it well-suited for constructing new imaginaries. “The synthesizer turns the producer into a navigator, moving through fictional space.”⁵³ Having said this, these practices are still necessarily shaped by the contextual milieu within which they are situated. I believe the most effective examples of speculative worlding work productively with this inevitability, intentionally drawing on real-world events, objects and phenomena as the launchpad for speculative exploration. In particular, I will consider the machine mythology of Drexciya, the hyperreal world-building of SOPHIE, and the algorithmic composition of Iannis Xenakis and Ryoji Ikeda.

- Machine mythology

While it is true that established club genres have increasingly become codified and homogenised through repetition, the original innovators of genres such as Detroit techno and electro sought to create music that induced ‘future shock’.⁵⁴ Like Lee 'Scratch’ Perry who liberated the previously repressed ‘re’ of recording, these producers used drum machines not to emulate the sound of acoustic percussion, but rather to program “rhythmatic intensities which are unrecognizable as drums.”⁵⁵ As emphatically declared by Eshun, the drum-machine “isn't percussion: it's electronic current, synthetic percussion, syncussion.”⁵⁶ While they are considered iconic today, machines such as the Roland TR-808 and 909 were initially unpopular within the mainstream music industry, with the likes of the Linn LM-1 being favoured for its realistic sample-based drum sounds. The limited commercial success of the machines led to sellers discarding overstock to pawn shops, where they were acquired by young African-American producers and repurposed for radically new forms of experimentation.⁵⁷

Of the ‘machine mythology’ discussed in More Brilliant Than The Sun, arguably the most compelling example is Drexciya. Drexciya “fictionalize frequencies into sound pictures of unreal environments,” synthesising bubbly sounds to conjure a mythical underwater world.⁵⁸ Navigating the depths of the ‘Black Atlantic,’⁵⁹ the duo take pregnant African women thrown overboard slave ships as the point of departure for counterfictional exploration, asking “is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?”⁶⁰ The “aquatically mutated descendants” of these women populate a submerged civilization that is meticulously developed over an extended output including titles such as Bubble Metropolis, Molecular Enhancement, Aquatic Invasion, The Unknown Aquazone and The Journey Home.⁶¹ As explained by Katherine McKittrick, the cosmogency offered by Drexciya is seductive because it “takes into account, and gives a regenerative future to, the violences that occurred on the Middle Passage.”⁶² In other words, it is a means for “escapology not escapism.”⁶³


- Hyperreality

Physical modelling synthesis uses mathematical representations of the physical behaviour of real-world objects to simulate how these materials might vibrate, resonate or decay. First developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s through research at the Center For Computer Research In Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, it has since shifted from a primarily academic pursuit to a creative tool for experimentation.⁶⁴ The value of this approach lies not only in its fidelity to real material interactions, but in its capacity for speculation. Modelling of hypothetical objects can be achieved by combining models of existing material with imagined physical properties to push beyond the limits of what is acoustically possible (say, for example, a violin made of glass or water). This allows for the creation of “concrete-abstract” sonic worlds grounded in the physics of sound production yet unbound by the natural constraints of our known environment.⁶⁵

While she did not use dedicated physical modelling technology, the hyperreal world-building of SOPHIE offers a variation on this approach by intuitively designing synthetic sounds based on the acoustic properties of materials such as latex, rubber and metal. SOPHIE famously insisted on making every sound from scratch, sculpting raw waveforms using tools such as the Elektron Monomachine rather than relying on samples.⁶⁶ This gives her music an uncanny tactile quality, where the sounds feel familiar, yet exaggerated.⁶⁷ While she sought to construct a ‘whole new world,’ this is assembled from the detritus of this one, instead of being completely detached from material reality.⁶⁸ In doing so, her music follows in a lineage of queer and trans artists that challenge normative distinctions between authenticity and artificiality, using synthetic sound to summon a speculative future free of biological determinism where one can be “any shape,” “any form,” “anything.”⁶⁹ While one could certainly make the case that this represents an intensification of liberal subjectivity, you could also argue her work gestures towards a kind of self-dissolution. Further, tracks like Faceshopping feel less like a straightforward celebration of commodified identity and more like an examination of the contradictions within contemporary capitalism.


- Algorithmic composition

While physical modelling simulates the behaviour of material interaction, algorithmic composition employs mathematical models to structure musical parameters such as pitch, duration and amplitude over time. These approaches can sometimes veer into pure abstraction however, constructing autonomous systems that operate according to closed internal logics with no direct reference to the external world. In contrast, composers such as Iannis Xenakis and Ryoji Ikeda have drawn from real-world phenomena, using mathematics as a means to imagine them musically. Xenakis initially applied this approach to orchestral instrumentation, however this was later extended in the context of synthesis.⁷⁰ La Légende d’Eer, for example, harnessed dynamic stochastic synthesis techniques to evoke the chaotic flux of natural energetic processes, asking what it might sound like for music to behave like matter.⁷¹

While Xenakis developed models inspired by such phenomena to inform composition, Ikeda uses scientific datasets to algorithmically render otherwise imperceptible structures of reality into audiovisual form. Pure sine waves (single frequency tones devoid of harmonic complexity) typically serve as the basic building blocks in this process, allowing numerical values to be mapped onto sonic parameters with high precision. This is exemplified in works such as the data-verse trilogy, which draws on open-source datasets from CERN, NASA and the Human Genome Project to convey the “progressive digitalization of an integrated global society.”⁷² Both artists demonstrate how algorithmic approaches grounded in empirical reality can produce strikingly original work that engages speculatively with non-human scale. For Xenakis, “originality is an absolute necessity” for the survival of both mankind and the cosmos.”⁷³ Composition, he believed, was a “struggle for existence.”⁷⁴

Conclusion

As stated in the introduction, the purpose of outlining these modes of worlding has not been to establish a hierarchy of value. Nor is the intention to propose a rigid taxonomy, especially given that many works mobilise multiple approaches. Instead, the aim is to offer a loose guide for thinking through the particular affordances of each tendency, including how various techniques and technologies might support these processes. At a time when the dominant culture often appears to be trapped within a ‘perpetual present’ that is constantly in motion yet rarely transformative, it feels worth exploring methodologies that might cultivate other avenues for perception and possibility - even if these are inevitably constrained by objective material conditions.⁷⁵ To this end, I have attempted to demonstrate how a deeper engagement with process might help to loosen the grip of capitalist realism. Locating alternative pathways does not necessarily require a turn towards futurity however, and there is at least as much to be gained from listening to the past or attending to what pulses beneath the surface of the present. This active engagement with the past can be distinguished from the “retro-paralysis”⁷⁶ and “shitpostmodernism”⁷⁷ that grips popular culture today.

To conclude then, I contend that practices which generate sound through electronic processes are particularly well-suited to speculative worlding and the construction of new imaginaries. The most effective examples of speculative practices take their point of departure from this world, rather than escaping into abstract futurism, however. Morphogenetic worlding, on the other hand, can reveal potentials embedded within existing material by drawing out latent qualities through mutation, decay and parametric translation. These potentials often relate not only to the material itself, but also to the associated contexts from which this material originated. Referential worlding, by contrast, resituates sonic material within new relational milieus. This might reconfigure relational meaning by challenging proprietary notions of authorship, or amplifying that which exists beyond the dominant frame - whether this be more-than-human agencies or cultural forms marginalised through colonial processes. All three approaches offer distinct but overlapping possibilities, with power to reshape our sense of reality through recontextualisation, transformation or speculative exploration. Taken together, they might gesture beyond the inertia of the present, inviting us to hear “the contours of another world.”⁷⁸

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<sub>1. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).
2. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014).
3. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009).
4. Marek Poliks, Nobody Listens to Music Anymore (2024). https://www.spreaker.com/episode/superlecture-nobody-listens-to-music-anymore-marek--63518567.
5. Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify & the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025).
6. It is worth noting that these habits are part of a longer trajectory where neoliberalism has produced a preference for the familiar. As Fisher (2014) himself notes, the art of seduction takes too much time in a climate where we are short on energy and attention due to precarious work and digital communication overload: 15.
7. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins
(University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
8. Discretisation refers to the rendering of signals into discrete numerical values, while abstraction is the use of simplified conceptual models (oscillators, filters etc) to generate and process those values.
9. Étude aux chemins de fer (1948) is widely recognised as the first example of musique concrète. Schaeffer recorded a number of sounds produced by trains and pressed them onto records. He then looped, slowed down and rearranged fragments of the recordings into a new composition.
10. Pierre Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects: an Essay across Disciplines, trans. Christine North and John Dack (University of California Press, 2017).
11. John Cage, Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
12. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (Quartet Books, 1998).
13. Ibid, -1.
14. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993).
15. Anthony Nine, “Blood and Fire,” Unsound: Undead, ed. Steve Goodman, Toby Heys & Eleni Ikoniadou (Urbanomic, 2019): 223.
16. Marie Thompson,“Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies,” Parallax, 23 (2017): 269.
17. Christoph Cox,“Sonic Realism and Auditory Culture: A Reply to Marie Thompson and Annie Go,” Parallax, 24 (2018): 234 - 242.
18. Sally-Jane Norman, “Tuning and Metagesture After New Natures,” The Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music, ed. Simon Emmerson (Routledge, 2018): 310.
19. Jonathon Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003).
20. John Oswald, Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative (1985), https://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html.
21. For example his track Pretender (2001), which takes Dolly Parton’s Great Pretender (1984) and gradually pitches it down over time.
22. https://plunderphonic.bandcamp.com/album/plexure-24.
23. Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2004): 137.
24. Ibid, 138.
25. https://chriswatsonreleases.bandcamp.com/track/vatnaj-kull.
26. Tom Flint, “Chris Watson: The Art Of Location Recording,” Sound on Sound, https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/chris-watson-art-location-recording.
27. Ambrose Field, “Simulation and Reality: the New Sonic Objects,” Music, Electronic Media and Culture (Taylor & Francis Group, 2000): 58.
28. Ruby Solly, He Hauora! He Hauoro!: the Use of Taonga Pūoro in Hauora Māori (2023): 1.
29. Ibid, 16.
30. Rob Thorne, “Jumping The Gap: The Distance Between Taonga Pūoro and Experimental Music,” Soundbleed, https://soundbleed.org.nz/ROB-THORNE-JUMPING-THE-GAP.
31. Ibid, 64.
32. Ibid, 63.
33. Ibid, 65.
34. Carl Mika, “An Indigenous Philosophy of Worldedness,” Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence (Routledge, 2017): 68.
35. Zachary Horton, The Cosmic Zoom: Scale, Knowledge and Mediation (University of Chicago Press, 2021): 8. “By “trans-scalar encounters” I mean the catalyzing events that take place when an observer adapted to a milieu defined by a particular scale of typical events encounters structures and processes at a different scale.”
36. By the late 1990s, samplers were increasingly used in conjunction with computer sequencers such as Cubase, which allowed for greater complexity and precision. By the turn of the millennium however, this hybrid approach had often been replaced by fully computer-based production.
37. Ibid, 68.
38. John Akomfrah, The Last Angel of History (The Black Audio Film Collective, 1996), https://akomfrah.site.seattleartmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2020/09/The-Last-Angel-of-History-Transcript.pdf.
39. Ibid, 70.
40. Ibid, 71.
41. Louis Chude-Sokei, “Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber,” Chimurenga, https://chimurengachronic.co.za/dr-satans-echo-chamber/.
42. Ian Penman, “Black Secret Tricknology," The Wire, http://www.moon-palace.de/tricky/wire95.html.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. https://thecaretaker.bandcamp.com/album/selected-memories-from-the-haunted-ballroom.
47. Ibid, 111.
48. Ibid, 104.
49. Ibid, 21.
50. https://boomkat.com/products/the-long-count-16d8c6ef-30e1-4e6f-80fa-6957fd643e18.
51. N. Katherine Hayles, “Technosymbiosis: Figuring (Out) Our Relations to AI,” Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, ed. Jude Browne (Oxford, 2023). This does not mean that the symbiotic relation between human and computational media is symmetrical or continuous. While AI models are informed by human input and their outputs shape human behaviour, Marek Poliks (2026) argues in Nectrolecture: The Excarnated Angel: On AI and the Impossibility of Touch that there is no reciprocity at the point of interface. “The feedback loop is so dramatically unbalanced between the technical evolution of the model and its direct reinjection back into the social field that sustains its evolution.” “The model rebuilds you every time. It has no memory of you.”
52. Stephen Roddy & Brian Bridges, “Cybernetic Resurgences: Machine Music Beyond AI Slop,” Artificial Media: Emerging Trends in Narratives, Education and Creative Practice, ed. Nelson Zagalo & Damián Keller (Springer, 2025).
53. Eshun, 159.
54. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (Random House, 1970).
55. Ibid, 79. “There are no snares - just waveforms being altered. There are no bass drums - just attack velocities.”
56. Ibid, 78.
57. DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture (Primary Information, 2022). The lack of commercial success was also due to a tax initiated by the American Federation of Musicians on the use of electronic equipment due to the perceived threat to live musicians in the mid-1980s.
58. Eshun, 84.
59. Ibid.
60. https://www.discogs.com/release/12117-Drexciya-The-Quest.
61. Ibid.
62. Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, (Duke University Press, 2020): 55.
63. https://kode9.bandcamp.com/album/astro-darien.
64. Adam Douglas, “Excite and Resonator: A History of Physical Modelling Synthesis,” Attack Magazine, https://www.attackmagazine.com/features/long-read/excite-and-resonate-a-history-of-physical-modelling-synthesis/.
65. Tom Mudd, Speculative Physical Modelling Synthesis: Personal Reflections on Making Music with the NESS Brass and Guitar Models, https://speculativesoundsynthesis.iem.sh/symposium/docs/proceedings/mudd/.
66. Oliver Macaulay, “An Uncanny Valley of Sonic Possibilities: Sophie’s Music and its Legacy,” National Science and Media Museum, https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/sophie-music-and-legacy/.
67. In one interview she discusses the image of a piano the size of a mountain for example, questioning what the sound of its massive strings might sound like.
68. https://soundcloud.com/msmsmsm/whole-new-world-pretend-world?in=ghto/sets/sleepy.
69. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB5tnokRFS0.
70. Such as Pithoprakta (1955), which was inspired by the thermodynamic movement of gas molecules.
71. https://karlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/la-l-gende-deer.
72. https://www.alminerech.com/exhibitions/10775-ryoji-ikeda-data-verse.
73. Makis Solomos, “Xenakis' Thought through his Writings,” Journal of New Music Research, 33 (2004): 134.
74. Ibid.
75. Frederic Jameson, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization (Verso Books, 2024).
76. Simon Reynolds, “Spectres of Mark: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Fisherati,” Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology & Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014): 238.
77. Kieran Press-Reynolds, “Shitpostmodernism: Understanding the Slopgeneration,” Spike Magazine, https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-shitpostmodernism.
78. Fisher, 192.</sub>

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Lucy Reid is a writer, researcher and sound artist, currently based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara. They are interested in the politics of audibility and exploring sound as a site of power and possibility. Lucy is also one half of live electronic duo crone and founding member of queer music collective MESH.

https://softcacophony.substack.com/