For people interested in the science and technology of musical sound.

What this is

A social network for people who are interested in technomusicology — how music and technology shape each other.

It started with people who took technomusicology courses at the College of DuPage, but you don't need to have gone there. If you think seriously about synthesis, production, music software, sound design, or the history of any of it, you belong here.

Why it's not on Facebook

There's a Facebook group too, and it's a fine place to find each other. This is different: nobody sells ads against your posts, no algorithm decides who sees what, and the people running it are members, not a company.

The tradeoff is that making an account here takes an extra couple of minutes.

Posts can be long here

Most servers like this cap posts at 500 characters. Ours allows 2,000 — enough for an actual track breakdown, a gear writeup, or production notes, without splitting it into six parts.

What you can upload

Images up to 16 MB. Audio and video up to 99 MB — which fits a full-quality WAV of a normal-length track, and most things you'd post.

Long-form work will run past it: a twenty-minute piece as WAV, a live set, or more than a couple of minutes of video. For those, link out — Bandcamp, a self-hosted file, wherever it already lives. The link previews fine here, and the file stays on somebody else's disk rather than ours.

Audio: wav, flac, mp3, ogg, m4a, aac. Video: mp4, webm, mov.

Signing up

Registration is open, but every request is read by a human before it's approved. That's the only thing keeping spam out, so it's not a formality — tell us a little about why you want to join.

Members can also send invites. If someone here invited you, you'll still go through the same review; the invite just tells us who vouched for you.

Helping out

This server is paid for by the people using it. The more we post and share, the more it costs to run — most of the bill is storage for images and audio, and that grows with how busy the place is rather than with how many people are signed up.

If you want to help cover it, there's a Ko-fi:

• monosynth — $2 a month. Supporter badge, and a link to your profile on the shoutout page.
• polysynth — $5 a month. Also a custom emoji for the server.
• modular — $20 a month. Also a shout-out in the monthly announcement, and a blurb of your own alongside your link.

That is all it gets you: a colored badge, and a say in the emoji. No longer posts, no extra reach, no separate timeline. Everyone is in the same room, and paying doesn't change your seat.

Would rather not be named? Say so and you won't be.

Who runs it

Two people, both members: @noise and @lucydawless. Server announcements come from @talkback.

Not a company, and not one person with a single point of failure — either of us can keep the place running.

Getting in touch

Questions, problems, or reports: contact@technomusicology.club

1. No harassment. This includes following someone across threads to keep arguing with them after they've asked you to stop.
2. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, casteism, or ableism. Not as jokes, not ironically, not "just asking questions".
3. Use content warnings for spoilers, politics, and anything graphic. If you're unsure whether something needs one, it probably does.
4. Describe your images and audio. Alt text is how blind and low-vision members read your post at all.
5. Don't post other people's private information, and don't repost things from locked accounts.
6. No spam, no engagement farming, no advertising at people. Sharing your own work is welcome — that's why people are here. Promotion is welcome too, tagged per rule 9.
7. Be a person, not a brand.
8. AI-generated work is allowed here — tag it #AIGenerated. That exact tag, so anyone who'd rather not see it can filter it out. Using machine learning as an instrument is on-topic, passing its output off as hand-made isn't, and posting it in bulk is spam under rule 6.
9. Tag promotion #Promo. Gigs, club nights, streams, releases, merch — yours or someone else's, online or local, all welcome. The tag is so anyone who'd rather not see promo can filter it out, not a mark against it. News and reviews aren't promotion; posting so people show up or buy something is.