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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
How much of your life is preprogrammed? Presets, or default settings on technology, can be found everywhere from predictive text and Instagram filters to microwave popcorn buttons and morning alarms. But while presets facilitate the completion of tasks and the production of art, they also reinforce—and sometimes challenge—economic, political, and social norms. In Preprogrammed, interdisciplinary scholar Amy Skjerseth turns to modern music and media to explore what presets allow and deny. Employing capitalist, queer, and feminist critique to reveal how audiovisual presets have reconfigured ways of seeing and hearing over the past century, Skjerseth shows how, from the popularization of the push-button car radio in the 1930s to the Auto-Tune era and the advent of AI, artists have co-opted preset technologies to develop new forms of artistic and cultural expression. An urgent reconsideration of the cultural and political systems we often take for granted, this book is an elegantly theorized and paradigm-shifting invitation to rethink the profundity of the everyday.
Amy Skjerseth is Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the University of California, Riverside, and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Voice and Identity.
"For Skjerseth, presets aren't just preconfigured pathways but critical opportunities for rethinking power, agency, and cultural givens. Stunningly written, capaciously argued, and deeply historical, Preprogrammed takes readers on a pathbreaking journey from twentieth-century car stereo buttons to today's Vocaloid personas in order to reprogram the relationships between science and the arts, the human and the technological, the visual and the audio. A revelatory work."—Jennifer Lynn Stoever, author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening
"An electrifying journey through the hidden power of presets, Preprogrammed transforms how we understand and hear modern music. From car radios to Auto-Tune, Skjerseth reveals how sound, culture, and technology collide and how artists push back against the default. Absorbing and deeply original, this book will change how you listen."—Lisa Parks, Distinguished Professor of Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara "This book is about the buttons we push, tap, and click the most—and think about the least. Skjerseth's study of electronic presets reveals important tensions between producers and consumers, norms and creativity, freedom and constraint. Skjerseth puts her finger on the hidden cost of technological efficiency: every 'simple push of a button' entails the ritual sacrifice of a thousand possibilities."—Mack Hagood, author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control