This piece examines the specific use of modernist musical aesthetics in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s text Mille plateaux, particularly the music and writing of Pierre Boulez. The philosophical figure of the ‘musical synthesizer’ is derived in part from the emerging popularity of a new musical instrument in the late 1970s, but mainly from Boulez’s writings on musical modernism nearly two decades earlier. Many of the key concepts in Mille Plateaux draw on Boulez’s discussion of the refinements of our perception of timbre with reference to a “hyperinstrument’, (synthesizer-to-come); which had the imagined capacity to ‘assemble modules, source elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and transformers)’. The paper investigates points of convergence and divergence between Boulez’s texts and Mille Plateaux, showing how the tensions inherent to the translations of technical musical concepts (such as striated and smooth) results in philosophical ambiguities, which in turn imply two distinct formulations of politics.