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Amy Skjerseth will discuss "Preprogrammed: How Electronic Presets Changed Music and Media." She will be joined in conversation by Jennifer Iverson. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.At the Co-op.
About the book: 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—or 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. Using capitalist, queer, and feminist critique, she 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 reconfigure ways of seeing and hearing and develop new forms of artistic and cultural expression. An urgent reconsideration of the cultural and political systems we often take for granted, this elegantly theorized and paradigm-shifting book invites us to rethink the profundity of the everyday.
About the authors: Amy Skjerseth is an assistant professor of popular music at the University of California, Riverside. Her work focuses on intersections of music, media, material culture, and technology. She is the coeditor of "The Routledge Companion to Voice and Identity" and the author of "Preprogrammed: How Electronic Presets Changed Music and Media" (open-access with University of California Press, September 2026). She is also working on a second monograph called "Breaking Down Gendered Walls of Sound." Her interdisciplinary work has appeared in journals from "[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies" and animation to "The Radio Journal" and "Journal of Popular Music Studies." She has directed several public-facing conferences and academic organizations, including Tay Day: Liverpool’s Version and the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies, and has appeared on BBC Breakfast, Radio France, and Sky News, among others.
About the interlocutor: Jennifer Iverson is an associate professor of music and the humanities at the University of Chicago. Her work explores the intersections between music, technologies, people, and history. Her first book is "Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde" (Oxford University Press, 2019). Jennifer currently is writing a book called "Synthesizing Ourselves: The Black Box That Changed Music Forever." Her articles appear in journals such as "Music Theory Spectrum," "Journal of the American Musicological Society," and in collections such as "Sounding Off" (Routledge, 2006) and "The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies" (Oxford University Press, 2016). She also frequently gives public and pre-concert lectures, appears on podcasts and radio broadcasts, and is a writer for "Forgotten Futures."
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5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
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