To say that the DX7’s arrival was earth-shaking would be no exaggeration: the affordable price, sound palette, and physical feel of the instrument combined to make the DX7 the new must-have instrument in every studio, garage, and university music department in the U.S. and the U.K.
Tag: 80s music
My SMT 2018 Activities
A study in timbre narratives and instrumentation in 1980s pop / The Dynamics of the Job Interview / Pop Music Interest Group meeting: small-group breakout sessions / Webmasterly duties
I want to make sure I don’t forget this incredible idea. S. Alexander Reed puts a little playlist together at the end of each of his chapters in his book Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. Love.
Beat of a Different Drummer?
The majority of spectrogram analysis methods are overly focused on overtones and partials.
’80s-inspired music
How do we make something sound ’80s? When today’s millennials—who were only infants or children in the ’80s—recreate an ’80s sound, how does it compare to an authentically ’80s sound? What elements of the ’70s or the ’90s get misremembered as an ’80s phenomenon? All these questions are discussed in the the latest Pop Unmuted episode.
Are We Not New Wave?
Today I finished reading Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s by Theo Cateforis. Cateforis focuses (among other things) on the significance of irony and of an alternative white masculinity in new wave culture, and I see parallels between that and today’s millennial-hipster culture.
Keyboard Magazine in 1986
It’s funny what we identify with and how we situate ourselves when we research an era of the past.
Analyzing timbre
I’ve removed this post, which was from 2016 (!), because my approach to timbre has evolved a lot. Readers should check out my MTO article instead, which was published in 2020. You can find more publications (all of which was published later than this blog post) on my Research page.
WHAT is the DEAL with TIMBRE?
After reading roughly 10,000 articles and books about the analysis of timbre, I can say with confidence this is how all of them start out. So here’s my own explanation of timbre’s DEAL. Timbre is more colloquially known as “tone color.” Imagine two different instruments, e.g., a violin and a trumpet, playing the same exact note… Continue reading WHAT is the DEAL with TIMBRE?