David Madden is Associate Professor and Chair of Screen Arts, and Seaver Fellow in Communication at Pepperdine University, where he teaches courses in media history, sound studies and design, storytelling, and scoring. His research examines sound and electronic music as sites through which broader questions of history, temporality, identity, and creative practice become audible and contestable, particularly through transatlantic processes of circulation, appropriation, and erasure. It mobilizes both critical theory and practice-based modes of knowledge production, grounded in his experience as a multi-instrumentalist, electronic music producer, composer, and sound artist. Madden’s current projects include a critical historical monograph on electronic music and a series of research-creation initiatives spanning sound art, soundscape composition, and electronic dance music.
His work as an artist-scholar has been supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Concordia University (Montreal, QC), Sony Music, Ageing + Communication + Technologies (ACT), the Mobile Media Lab (MML), and Pepperdine University. As a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, Madden plans to complete final revisions on the forthcoming manuscript Electroclash and the Cultural Politics of Electronic Dance Music (University of California Press), produce a full-length album under the moniker DD, score a feature film, and begin work on a new manuscript project titled Fingers in Front of Eyes: A Phenomenology of Illness and Electronic Music Production. The project traces how illness reconfigures embodiment and creative practice through the affordances of electronic music production, interrogating how lived experience emerges through relations among bodies, interfaces, instruments, software, and sound.
