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This chapter discusses music theory’s neglect of EDM as it relates to the dominant methodologies of the field and Philip Ewell’s concept of the white racial frame, arguing that EDM is overlooked due to implicit biases against racial Otherness and against technological mediation, biases that runs deep enough in US culture to have impacted the trajectory of music theory as an academic field. The chapter examines unpitched percussion through analysis of performance, timbre, and texture in a Roland TR-909 drum machine “workout” performed by Jeff Mills. This analysis models one way that music theory might learn to take EDM seriously. By broadening the methodological toolbox, music theory can begin to course-correct and become more inclusive of music that challenges certain principles of Western music.

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.

It’s almost a platitude to mention that timbre is the most important musical dimension in popular music; the statement is so often repeated. Take one example from Mark Spicer, writing in 2005: “for the experienced listener and analyst, it is often the particular timbres featured on a pop or rock record that allow us to position that track historically and which, in turn, render the track most meaningful for us.” Spicer also wrote in the same article that “unlike pitch and rhythm, timbre remains the one musical parameter that popular music scholars have found almost impossible to convey” (Spicer 2005, 14). But now, thirteen years later, dozens of musicologists have risen to meet this challenge. The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music, edited by Robert Fink, Melinda Latour, and Zachary Wallmark, presents an expertly curated series of essays that analyze the role of timbre in a wealth of different genres, using a great diversity of approaches. This book demonstrates that timbre is a subfield that is positively booming with activity, as it collects fifteen different authors providing many paths that an aspiring timbre analyst might follow., Current Musicology, No 103 (2018): Current Musicology

Two distinct approaches to timbre analysis exist, each with complementary strengths and limitations. First, music theorists from the 1980s adopt a positivist mindset and look for ways to quantify timbral phenomena, often using spectrograms, while avoiding any cultural dimensions in their work. Second, writings of the past five years focus on the cultural aspects of timbre but make no use of spectrograms. This dissertation builds upon these two approaches by synthesizing them: discussion is grounded in spectrogram analysis, but situated within a broad cultural context, through interactions with listener experience and ethnographic study of music periodicals and other published interviews. The theory is applicable to any genre of music, but 1980s popular music is used as a case study, with a particular focus on the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, used in much of this music.