Matthew Mendez

Matthew Mendez is a music historian committed to bringing methodological perspectives from German media theory and the study of Kulturtechniken to bear on post-1945 experimental sound and music. His dissertation project consists of a media genealogy and historical epistemology of the information-theoretic voice: framing the coalescence of new musical, legalistic, and identitarian ontologies as a reaction to the exteriorization and algorithmization of the human voice over the long twentieth century, the dissertation chronicles the gradual breakdown of those same ontologies in the face of the new regimes of truth operationalized by the informational voice. Matt is also interested in the contemporary ramifications of this dynamic, and in particular, the relationships between current vocal politics (i.e. agency as “having a voice”) and “post-truth” in the U.S., Europe, and Russia. A secondary research focus is the material-semiotic transculturation of musical genre and expressive culture in the circum-Atlantic Spanish-speaking world over the longue durée.