Overview
Moira de Kok is a PhD candidate in Music and Sound Studies and a scholar of popular music. Her dissertation project, tentatively titled “Synthness: Intimate Attachments to Synthesizers in the Long 1980s,” explores how the popularization of synthesizers intertwined with discourses of control, power, and identity in the US from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Radical developments in synthesizer technology and the aesthetics of popular music destabilized the ontological and social status that synthesizers had secured throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The project tracks how, reacting to this destabilization, musicians and listeners cultivated intimate attachments to instruments and their sounds, attachments filtered through gendered, sexual, racialized, and classed positions. What emerges from specialized magazines, owner’s manuals, television programs, archival documents, developments in instrument design, music videos, and recordings is their overarching concern about synthness: what synthesizers could and should be, do, and sound like, and what they mean in relation to contemporary musical and socio-political issues.
Moira also investigates the aesthetics of twenty-first-century internet music cultures and how they sustain fascination for the technologies and sounds of the 1980s. She has presented her work on nostalgic and atmospheric YouTube edits at conferences across Europe as well as the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. Her essay “Making Queer Kinship with Music: Listening to Songs ‘From the Bathroom at a Party’” was awarded the 2026 Biddy Martin Graduate Prize by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Studies program at Cornell University.
Prior to arriving at Cornell, Moira received a B.A. (cum laude) in Musicology with a minor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies, and an M.A. (cum laude) in Musicology, both from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her master’s thesis, “Sounds of Solidarity: Music in the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike,” which investigates how solidarity as a political concept mediated and was mediated by musical practices during this strike in the UK, was awarded the 2023 Best Research Master Thesis Prize by the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University and the 2023 Hélène Nolthenius Prize by the Royal Society for Music History of the Netherlands.