Joanna Demers

Joanna Demers examines how experimental electronic music challenges ordinary ideas about sound, authorship, and musical meaning. Listening through the Noise develops that inquiry by giving listeners a vocabulary for drone, noise, microsound, field recording, and other practices that do not fit comfortably within traditional musical analysis. Oxford University Press published the study in 2010 as Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Demers holds a musicology professorship at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where she also serves as associate dean for faculty affairs. Her wider scholarship connects electronic music with aesthetics, intellectual property, and environmental sound, placing the book within a sustained study of how new technologies alter both creative practice and attentive listening.