In Search of the Soul of the Drum Machine: Electronic Dance Music and Technological Anxiety

• In Event: Dancing the Anthropocene: Envisioning Rituals, Bodies, Environments and Political Situatedness through the Lens of Dance - I

Abstract

The slogan “drum machines have no soul” captures beautifully a key criticism of contemporary electronic music and, by extension, modern technological culture itself. This study investigates the human/machine dichotomy as manifest in contemporary electronic dance music (EDM) culture.

This dichotomy manifests anxieties about the relationship between the human and the technological that are consistent with those that emerge throughout the history of technology. Particularly interesting from my perspective is the critique emerging from within the culture, since technology is so central to the culture at all levels: invention, production, distribution, and consumption. Entire musical subgenres have emerged thanks to the availability of computer programs (Jamaican dancehall’s popular “sleng teng” subgenre, for example, is based entirely around a musical loop preprogrammed into a popular keyboard), and their popularity is often dependent on distribution via the world wide web.

Nevertheless, participants in EDM cultures actively promote ideologies of human originality and musical technique that presume a rigid line between human and machine. Patterns found in these discourses suggest anxieties about the boundary between human and machine that presume a kind of romantic separation between human and machine that is ironically the very proposition most challenged by the popularity of electronic dance music culture today. The implications here go far beyond popular music, but EDM culture gives us a frame from which to understand some of them: this romantic separation is actually at the heart of our understanding of human subjectivity itself.

Author

• Bernardo Attias, California State University, Northridge