How much of your life is preprogrammed? Presets, or default settings on technology, can be found everywhere, from predictive text and Instagram filters to microwave popcorn buttons and morning alarms. But while presets facilitate the completion of tasks and the production of art, they also reinforce—or sometimes challenge—economic, political, and social norms. In Preprogrammed, interdisciplinary scholar Amy Skjerseth turns to modern music and media to explore what presets allow and deny. Using capitalist, queer, and feminist critique, she shows how, from the popularization of the push-button car radio in the 1930s to the Auto-Tune era and the advent of AI, artists have co-opted preset technologies to reconfigure ways of seeing and hearing, and to develop new forms of artistic and cultural expression. An urgent reconsideration of the cultural and political systems we often take for granted, this elegantly theorized and paradigm-shifting book invites us to rethink the profundity of the everyday. “Stunningly written, capaciously argued, and deeply historical. A revelatory work.” — JENNIFER LYNN STOEVER, author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening “This book is about the buttons we push, tap, and click the most—and think about the least. Amy Skjerseth puts her finger on the hidden cost of technological efficiency: every ‘simple push of a button’ entails the ritual sacrifice of a thousand possibilities.” — MACK HAGOOD, author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control “Skjerseth rethinks a host of relationships that are central to popular music: be-tween agency and control, human and machine, and nature and artifice. There is no other book quite like this one.” — STEVE WAKSMAN, author of Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé “An electrifying journey through the hidden power of presets. Absorbing and deeply original, this book will change how you listen.” — LISA PARKS, University of California, Santa Barbara AMY SKJERSETH is Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the University of California, Riverside.