Why Do Trans People Love Synthesizers? (Guest Op-Ed)

The following is an op-ed by a guest writer, friend and musician Mooglespy AKA Mother Dessicant. This was originally posted on a private discord server, but I felt it was worth posting here with their permission. It’s an interesting introspective on gender and synthesis which I feel can be applied to a vast array of things. Check out their work here: https://motherdessicant.bandcamp.com/

I was outright asked this question once over the wild internet. It’s a good question, honestly. As a trans individual myself, it feels like the sort of thing I should be able to answer. Wendy Carlos, Emily Gillet, Lisa Bella Donna, all some of the most prominent figures in synthesizers and they’re all trans. How many hobbies can you say that about? The collective gut feeling is that there’s something inherently trans about synthesizers, particularly modular synthesizers.

So, I thought about it way too much and I think I may have an answer. I can only speak for myself, as transness isn’t a monolith and my experience will differ from others’, but my conclusion is something which may hold true in many people’s cases. Let me talk a bit about making music first:

Why do we make music? Not reproduce music as a classical pianist or college-dude-with-an-acoustic-guitar would, but truly create something new? Adapting a song that already exists into a wildly different genre or replacing all the lyrics also counts. Moreover what drives us to write something from scratch and make something wholly original? The prize and purpose of creating music (or any art) is the fulfillment of self-expression.

When the song sounds on the playback exactly like it did in your head, there’s no better feeling in the world. When it’s perfect, you know it’s perfect because you set all of the expectations. Our music is all expressions of ourselves. It’s a projection of that which is inside of you. Even the steadfast concert pianist I mentioned earlier is expressing something about themselves in attaining perfect execution of a notoriously difficult piece. This sort of genuine expression actually sits very close to gender on a conceptual level, doesn’t it?

In realizing who we are, transgressing the gender binary line tends to lead to the dissolution of the gender binary itself in our minds. A given single-gender grouping of cisgendered people would all express themselves in wildly different ways: A “traditional wife”, raised to expect to serve their husband. A celebrity gossip writer from a large city. The lowkey hippie ecology major with a garden in every room. A goth. There are so many overtones and subharmonics to what it means to be feminine or masculine with a wide, blurry line between the two. Again, aligning “the self” we have with “self-expression” we’ve found feels beyond the word “incredible”.

I know a lot of women in various stages of their transition and almost all of them have been drawn to music at some point. So if gender and music feel so similar, where do modular synthesizers come into this?

NOW it’s time to talk about synthesizers! I’m very excited to do this, as you can see. Alright, ahem, this is how a classical synthesizer synthesis path works from keypress to sound output which you’ll find in nearly all classical synths from Moog to Korg:

keys>oscillator>filter>amplifier>output

By the time you’re considering a modular system, you probably know this already. Modular feels like the perfect way to make frankensynths which function in parts just like the above, classical method. The Roland Juno oscillator, Korg MS-20 filter, a tube VCA from a soviet-era synthesizer design. You can see how this unlocks the full potential of “classical synthesis”! What a time to be alive.

So, I’m not even talking about trans people here: Nobody does this.

I mean seriously, save for a few fringe passion projects or incredibly focused sound designers, I cannot say I’ve met a single person with a modular system who assembled it to achieve a linear synthesis path. You get like 2 effect modules and a semimodular, then some extra LFOs and modulation sources, and you find a signal mangler that literally runs the signal through wet dirt. Things get crazy and experimental so fast in this hobby that even Zoe Blade’s very serious-looking Doepfer wall has synthesis possibilities within it that very few closed boxes could provide.

The design, simplicity, or total inscrutability of somebody’s own, designed system informs the sound. That sound is music, and the music is an expression of the self. Every system I’ve seen quickly falls off the “East Coast Synthesis (Osc>Filter>VCA)” vs “West Coast Synthesis(Weird robot noises)” divide. With Kubrickian control we can design our perfect instrument and wire it every way we feel. We can make it sing and express the self. In fact, trying to work with someone else’s modular system is frequently a confusing affair if you’re not familiar with all of their modules. Even closed boxes have all those knobs to mess with the presets or design our very own sound from scratch and everyone has a different favorite knob. Our instruments and music are how we love to express ourselves: With some modicum of… well, um.

Control… I guess.

Nothing has control like a synthesizer does. They’re infamous for the sheer number of knobs that adorn them. The complexity of a synthesizer’s internals are highly sought after. It gets to the point where the limitations of a system you’ve designed start feeling like comfortable and acceptable boundaries to your self-expression. This is all very unlike the closed box of a prefabricated guitar or the limitless digital possibilities of DAWs (Which don’t get me wrong, all the other trans individuals are using if they don’t have a physical synthesizer.) It’s all about finally having control over what we express and how.

We can finally control our self expression with these instruments. We can express ourselves in the many nuanced ways we’ve always wanted to. It’s so important for so many of us to finally find how we relate to ourselves. Upon finding ourselves, we want to share these feelings with others.

So we design the very tools to do so. Software or hardware, played or sequenced, that sound from the Roland Jupiter or sounds from the planet Jupiter. It’s a skill to learn, but the prize is self-expression. The music which is ours.

Synthesists: Perhaps the gender role given to you upon birth aligns with your self-experience. You don’t need to be trans to like synthesizers obviously, but that feeling of pure self expression shouldn’t be alien to you. We all want to design our sound in a way that fulfills the self. Given freedom, at the end of the self-expression design process almost nobody desires pure classical synthesis. That experience is what it means to be transgender: To hear the sounds we are told we cannot make, but need to in order to express ourselves to others and the self. Support your local trans individuals, because gender and music aren’t all that far apart. May we all make our truest sounds together.

Again, this was posted in a Discord server. The author then made additional comments in relation to what others said, which I’m adding as an addendum.

So synthesis and gender are again alike in that the first time we try to express it, we’re not necessarily the best at it.

Like any other skill, expressing ourselves takes practice. Learning to use makeup effectively, finding what kind of clothes suit us and how we feel. We know what it means to work, learn, and mess up while trying to attain self-expression. Sometimes we just aim lower for a while, then as we learn more about the Octatrack of the self we can do more tricks, turns, and twists on the kind of work we’re trying to project. We build it faster and closer to the song in our heads.

Just like not every gender is outside the binary, not every piece of modular music needs to be “Experimental”

Like in Zoe Blade’s case, it’s almost a classical synth at first glance but there’s a ton of possibilities in the banks upon banks of basic utilities. I feel like it says a lot about them as a person that they would design that system.

Zoe Blade stans MSPaint is what I’m saying here.

Rigid gender conformity like rigid classical conformity is also a form of self-expression that’s employed towards all sorts of goals from making money to self expression, to getting laid. You definitely know someone who’s hyper-masc or hyper-fem because it pulls tail, and you probably know someone who plays a mean AC/DC solo because it impresses the girlz.

It’s that wonderful allure of complete control! You don’t need to be trans to enjoy it, necessarily, but when you’re working with the core components of musical self-expression it’s very freeing for the sort of person for who feels constrained by “closed boxes” in their lives to have access to the raw building blocks of their art.

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