DJ Performance Analysis: Issues, concepts, methods

What do DJs do on their equipment and why? How might an analyst measure and interpret these gestures? What can researchers learn more broadly about performance by examining DJs’ creative improvisation at a time when playlists are increasingly curated by proprietary algorithms? In this article, I argue that methods of analysing recorded DJ sets are well-positioned to answer these kinds of questions with musicological specificity that complements findings from ethnographic fieldwork and other established methods. Although DJs exercise great agency in shaping the sonic and social environment of the dance floor throughout popular music, from electronic dance music to hip-hop, the strategies they deploy in live turntable performance have so far been underexplored in the literature while sociological and anthropological methods are over-represented. At stake in this issue is scholars’ ability to demystify how received aesthetic principles are shaped by both tradition and the contingencies of real-time performance. I respond to this state of the field by assembling a toolkit of methods and concepts that accounts for the breadth of styles in DJing, with the aim of introducing this mode of research to a wider audience and enabling future studies. The article begins with a brief cultural history of the DJ, before defining core vocabulary and practical concerns facing the analyst. I then critically review key methods such as track listing, tempo mapping and spectrogram analysis and briefly apply these to an example from the dub scene in Bristol, UK.