Dr. Tara Rodgers (Analog Tara) is a multi-instrumentalist composer, sound engineer, historian, and writer. Tara explores sound as material and metaphor; music as a portal to history, identity, and community; performance as moments of encounter among people, technologies, and environments; creativity and improvisation as individual and collective practices of hope.
Tara’s music, which spans genres and methods, is described as “regal and atmospheric” (Resident Advisor), “layered, complex, and performative” (Routledge), “both powerful and soothing” (Bandcloud), and “beautifully austere… bold in the precision and subtlety it takes to mix such signals with thrill and grace and restraint” (NPR Music). Tara presented a solo exhibition of sound and multimedia art, Patterns of Movement: Data and Sound Works, 2005-12, at Stamp Gallery in Maryland (2012); and a retrospective concert of music from the past 20 years at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at RPI (2025).
Noted as an “internet trailblazer” (XLR8R) for embracing online platforms for music education and community, Tara founded the website pinknoises.com in 2000 to celebrate and connect women making electronic music and make resources on music production more widely accessible. The site was nominated for a Webby Award in 2003.
Tara extended this project with Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Duke University Press, 2010), a book of interviews that is “changing the ways we think about electronic music” (Cycling ’74). Pink Noises has sparked creativity in many settings: taught in university courses, distributed in toolkits that teach young people about music technology in the UK, cited as a shared resource among electronic music producers in eastern Cuba and at a community-based recording studio in Pittsburgh, and honored by kindred events that borrow its name from Seattle to Sicily to Warsaw.
As a historian and multidisciplinary scholar, Tara has published essays in several foundational scholarly collections: The Sound Studies Reader; Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music; Keywords in Sound; The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities; Electronica, Dance and Club Music in The Library of Essays on Popular Music; and special issues on sound by the journals American Quarterly and differences. From 2012–20, she served on the editorial board of Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press) and contributed writing and curating there. Her essays and interviews have been translated into multiple languages. In keynotes, public lectures, and workshops at venues such as MUTEK, Ableton Loop, and Harvard, she is a thoughtful critic of the history of music technology and passionate advocate for the arts and social justice.
Awards and honors include a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholarship (2006-07), New Genre Composition Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2006), IAWM Pauline Alderman Book Award (2011), Washington Area Music Award (Wammie) Nomination for Best Electronic/Techno Artist (2019), and Maryland State Arts Council Professional Development Grant (2025). The Tara Rodgers/Pink Noises archive is at NYU Fales Library & Special Collections.
A lifelong self-taught musician and recordist, Tara also earned an MFA in Electronic Music & Recording Media at Mills College and a PhD in Communication Studies at McGill University. She is originally from upstate New York and is based in the Washington, DC, area, where she founded and operates the Analog Forest studio.