• What Makes It Sound ’80s?

    Author(s):
    Megan Lavengood (see profile)
    Date:
    2019
    Group(s):
    American Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory, Society for Music Theory – Popular Music Interest Group
    Subject(s):
    Music theory, Popular music, Musicology, Musical instruments, Electronic dance music
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    synthesizers, yamaha dx7, timbre, 1980s, spectrograms, Popular Music Studies, Organology
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/1abw-6g14
    Abstract:
    Popular music of the 1980s is remembered today as having a “sound” that is somehow unified and generalizable. The ’80s sound is tied to the electric piano preset of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. Not only was this preset (E. PIANO 1) astonishingly prevalent—heard in up to 61% of #1 hits on the pop, country, and R&B Billboard charts in 1986—but the timbre of E. PIANO 1 also encapsulates two crucial aspects of a distinctly ’80s sound in microcosm: one, technological associations with digital FM synthesis and the Yamaha DX7 as a groundbreaking ’80s synthesizer; and two, cultural positioning in a greater lineage of popular music history. This article analyzes the timbre of E. PIANO 1 by combining ethnographic study of musician language with visual analysis of spectrograms, a novel combination of techniques that links acoustic specificity with social context. The web of connections created by the use and re-use of DX7 presets like E. PIANO 1, among hundreds or maybe thousands of different tracks and across genres, is something that allows modern listeners to abstract a unified notion of the “’80s sound” from a diverse and eclectic repertoire of songs produced in the 1980s.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1525/jpms.2019.313009
    Publisher:
    University of California Press
    Pub. Date:
    2019-9-6
    Journal:
    Journal of Popular Music Studies
    Volume:
    31
    Issue:
    3
    Page Range:
    73 - 94
    ISSN:
    1533-1598,1533-1598
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
    Share this:

    Downloads

    Item Name: pdf lavengood-2019-“what-makes-it-sound-’80s”-the-yamaha-dx7-electr.pdf
      Download View in browser
    Activity: Downloads: 600

    Back to Deposits