Dr. Mike D’Errico initiated the Electronic Digital Instrument program at Albright, allowing students to take applied music lessons in DJing, beatmaking, synthesis, and other forms of digital music production. He is also the founder of the Albright Rap Collective, an official performing ensemble on campus comprising rappers and producers. As a DJ and producer of hip-hop and electronic dance music, Dr. D’Errico has performed and collaborated with hip-hop and electronic dance music artists from Boston to Los Angeles. As a digital media artist, he has worked as a sound designer for virtual reality art installations and experimental video games, and he has developed mobile apps for music and multimedia annotation. His research interests include hip-hop, electronic dance music, popular music and technology, video games, and emerging digital media. His book, Push: Software Design and the Cultural Politics of Music Production (Oxford University Press, 2022), examines how trends in music software and digital instrument design influence the composition and production of electronic music. He currently serves on the executive committee for the US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and is a former technical editor of two online music journals, Echo: a music-centered journal and Ethnomusicology Review. Dr. D’Errico holds degrees in musicology, music, and music education from UCLA, Tufts University, and the University of New Hampshire, and has served on the faculty of music, music industry, and media studies departments at Pitzer College, Pomona College, and UCLA. Mike is on the executive board for Lion Records at Albright.

Popular Music

Hip-Hop, Electronic Dance Music, The Music Industry, Global Popular Music

Music Technology

Audio Engineering, Music Production, Live Audio, Digital Audio Workstations (Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Logic Pro X, FL Studio, Bitwig Studio)

Digital Media

Experience Design, Interaction Design, Video Games, Software, User Interface

• “Beats, Rhymes, and Life.” Hip-Hop Panel and Performance presented in collaboration with the Albright Rap Collective, Albright College
• “Kintsugi.” Score for Theatre Production, Albright College
• “Sound Masses and Wine Glasses.” Faculty Recital, Albright College
• “Mosaic.” Score for Theatre Production, Albright College
• “Music for Games and Interactive Media.” Pitzer College, Claremont, CA
• “Love From Afar: A Multimedia Concert.” The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
• “Walk Among Worlds.” The Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, CA
• “Frequency.” The Smell, Los Angeles, CA
• UCLA Game Arts Festival. The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
• Boston Cyberarts Festival. Atlantic Wharf, Boston, MA
• MUSO Presents: The Books and The Attic Bits. University of New Hampshire
  Ordnance Multimedia Club Night Residency. Champion’s Café, Boston, MA
• Naked Arts—Creativity Exposed. University of New Hampshire
• The Man Who Was Thursday. AXIOM Gallery, Boston, MA

FYS100 The Cultural Politics of Hip-Hop

MUS103D Rap Collective

MUS109/209 Applied Lessons in Music Technology and Production

MUS126 Music & Cinema

MUS211 Commercial Music Theory 1

MUS212 Commercial Music Theory 2

MUS243 Music Business: An Introduction

MUS244 Music Marketing

MUS250 Introduction to Music Technology

MUS251 Recording Techniques

MUS284 Popular Music & Digital Culture

MUS350 Mixing & Mastering

MUS351 Music Production

MUS311 Commercial Arranging

MUS312 Songwriting

MUS482 Internship

DIG250 Sound Design for Visual Media

DIG280 Game History & Development

DIG310 Introduction to Game Design

DIG311 Experience Design & Narrative

DIG470 Game Production

• Push: Software Design and the Cultural Politics of Music Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
• “Plugin Cultures: The Digital Audio Workstation as Maximal Interface.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no. 4 (2021).
• “The Biopolitics of Synthesizers.” In The Oxford Handbook of Electronic Dance Music, edited by Robin James and Luis-Manuel Garcia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
• “Compression Aesthetics: Transducing Segregation in the Los Angeles Beat Scene.” In Electronic Cities: Music Policies and Space in the 21st Century. Palgrave McMillan, 2021.
• “‘Diggin’ in the Carts’: Technologies of Play in Hip-Hop Production and Performance.” In Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound, edited by Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
• “Electronic Music.” In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Ethnomusicology, edited by Janet Sturman and Geoffrey J. Golson (Sage Publications, 2017).
• “Worlds of Sound: Indie Games, Proceduralism, and the Aesthetics of Emergence.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9, no. 2 (January 2016).
• “Off the Grid: Instrumental Hip-Hop and Experimentalism After the Golden Age.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, edited by Justin Williams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• “Electronic Dance Music in the Dubstep Era.” In Oxford Handbooks Online. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• “Bassweight: Dubstep and the Transnational Space of Hip-Hop.” In Hopeless Youth! Tallinn, Estonia: Estonian National Museum, 2015.
• “How to Reformat the Planet: Technostalgia and the ‘Live’ Performance of Chipmusic.” Journal on the Art of Record Production 6 (2012).

• Lion Records, Faculty Representative
• International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Executive Board
• Journal of Popular Music Studies, Manuscript Reviewer
• American Musicological Society, Communications Committee
• Music Industry Data, Academic Rights Press, Researcher
• “Inertia: A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities,” Conference Committee Chair

• Class of ’49 Annadora Vesper Shirk Award for Faculty Scholarship (2022)
• Albright Creative Research Experience (2022, 2021, 2020)
• Reading Music Foundation Special Projects Grant (2021)