Synthetic Media in Contemporary Hip-hop

About the Project

This PhD project will address the new aesthetic, technical, and citational practices that have evolved around the use of synthetic media in contemporary hip-hop (understood as a global meta-genre, and inclusive of grime, trap etc).

Scholars have persisted in interpreting such media through the frame of sampling and remix culture, themselves inherited from nearly a century of criticism on the status of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. But the concept of ‘synthesis’ that has come to refer to the products of generative AI does not imply an original-copy relation. As such, it has been harder to assimilate to existing legal, moral, and philosophical frameworks of authorship--hence calls for new forms of copyright to protect e.g. vocal likeness.

Some questions that arise from this new arrangement may include:

• How are the evolving commercial and legal norms in this area informing musical practice in hip-hop? (For instance, new licensing arrangements between musical rights holders and AI music companies.)
• In what ways might emerging restrictions and the creative licenses they beget call for a new analytics of power and resistance for contemporary popular music?
• What practices and discourses of authentication are emerging around uses of synthetic media in hip-hop, and what methods should we deploy to analyse them?
• Are there different moral economies in play when amateur hip-hop musicians make use of synthetic voices as opposed to stars?

The successful candidate will join SYNCULTURE, an ERC-funded project that seeks to develop a richer understanding of musical synthesis as a cultural technique, both in the present and in history.