Abstract
This thesis explores the evolution of dubstep as a form of electronic dance music. Between approximately 2003 and 2013, dubstep grew from a London-centred subculture to a commercial force in North America. Concurrently, the genre’s prominent musical tendencies shifted from syncopated rhythms and reverberant sound worlds to rigid beats and angry robotic timbres. How and why stylistic evolutions like this occur have yet to be given proper musicological examination. As a foundational work, this study brings together comparative music analysis with thematic and discursive analyses, historiography, intertextual analysis and media archaeology in a novel methodology, grounded in new materialist thinking.The study is grouped into four key areas, with the significance of each explored in turn. Chapter 1 looks at the role of space and place, in both a material and ideal sense. Chapter 2 looks at the agency of musical materials circulating within and between these locales. Chapter 3 considers the transmediality of dubstep and sci-fi cinema, and their aesthetic resonance with a technologically saturated structure of feeling. This leads to Chapter 4, which looks at technology in two ways: as an ecosystem of creative tools, and as an epistemological music-making environment, with similar yet starkly different dynamics to material space and place. In conclusion, all these areas are shown to be interdependent aspects of an entangled “mycelial musicking body” into which music-makers are entangled. The sounds that reach our ears through music are expressions of this mycelial structure, and a change in any of its regions affects change throughout. This model reveals what lay behind dubstep’s evolution, and moreover it can be applied to understanding the formation and evolution of any popular music style.
| Date of Award | 20 Jan 2026 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Thomas Irvine (Supervisor) & Justin A Williams (Supervisor) |
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