Trevor Van De Velde’s research explores the dynamics between technology and performance within East Asian sound cultures. During the GRI fellowship, Van De Velde will be developing his dissertation, Cybernetic Sound Systems, which examines karaoke and rhythm games as “sonic systems” shaped by musical, cultural, and technical logics rooted in East Asian histories and contexts. Van De Velde is particularly interested in how material infrastructures and historical conditions inform these practices, and how they offer alternative models for understanding technological and sonic engagement.
Van De Velde’s focus on karaoke and rhythm games stems not only from their complex integration of musicality and media systems, but also from their significance as culturally situated practices. While existing scholarship often addresses either their musical interfaces or their cultural meanings, this project bridges that divide by proposing that performing these systems reveals underlying sono-cultural values and aesthetics. Van De Velde approaches these practices not simply as social activities, but as broader technological performance infrastructures that challenge Western-centric concepts of notation, temporality, and liveness in contemporary music and music theory.
Both karaoke and rhythm games require performers to interact with fixed media systems, guided by visual interfaces that shape and dictate musical gestures. Van De Velde is interested in how these interactions produce distinct forms of technological embodiment, as well as their resulting sonic characteristics. In karaoke, Van De Velde examines how practices of vocal imitation and the use of DIY or low-fidelity backing tracks reconfigure ideas of replication and performance. In rhythm games, he explores how controller design and game aesthetics often draw from Western instruments and cyberpunk iconography which aids in reframing the body as both an interface and an instrument. Across both practices, Van De Velde also considers how new forms of virtuosity emerge through repetition and feedback.
Ultimately, this research argues that these sonic systems offer alternative frameworks for understanding technologies as a culturally embedded, performative, and world-building process.