this video is sponsored by CuriosityStream!
hey, welcome to 12tone!
I want you to close your eyes.
metaphorically, anyway: you can keep watching the video, but clear your mind.
got it? ok, now I want you to imagine what the music of the 1980s sounded like.
don't picture a specific song, band, or even genre: try to hear the decade.
like, if I wanted to play you a song, and the only thing I told you about it was that
it was recorded in 1986, what would you expect to hear? is it something like this? (bang)
yeah.
that's what I thought.
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
that sound is the Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer or, more precisely, the E PIANO 1 preset,
and to be clear, yes, there were other good answers too: maybe you thought of electronic
drum kits, or if you're a metalhead like me you might've been hearing a shotgun snare.
but when you listen to music from the '80s, you pretty quickly notice that, across genres,
E PIANO 1 is everywhere.
heck, at the height of its popularity in 1986, it showed up in over 60% of Billboard's #1
R&B singles, and around 40% of the #1 singles on the Country and Hot 100 charts too. and,
to be clear, those numbers aren't for the DX-7 in general: that got used even more.
this is just one preset, one omnipresent sound that came to define what it means to be musically
'80s. it's one of the most instantly recognizable tones in all of modern music, and my friend
Dr. Megan Lavengood decided to figure out why.
but first, a little history.
the first recognizably modern synthesizer was produced by Theremin manufacturer Robert
Moog in 1964: a few earlier synths existed, but they were the size of a room and ran on
punch cards.
Moog, along with composer Herbert Deutsch, shrank the machinery to a slightly more manageable
size, and introduced a keyboard so it could be played in real time like an actual instrument.
still, though, the whole thing sold for around 10 thousand dollars, or over 80 thousand in
today's money, so these were not easily accessible, but with the help of Wendy Carlos and other
early adopters, the Moog introduced the world to the concept of analog synthesis and began
the synthesizer revolution.
at it heart, analog synthesis works by generating a signal, then passing that signal through
a series of amplifiers, modulators, envelopes, and other technical-sounding things in order
to create a specific tone with a high degree of control and accuracy.
in the original Moog design this was done with cables that physically linked different
units together, but as the technology advanced, you got newer synths like the Minimoog or
the Roland Jupiter-8 that kept all that machinery inside, making them both easier to move and
easier to afford.
still, though, even the Jupiter-8 cost over 5 thousand dollars on its release in 1981,
which is about 15 thousand today, well out of most people's price ranges.
but around that time, another technology was rapidly becoming cheaper and more powerful:
the computer.
it wasn't long before engineers started to wonder if they could use digital technology
to make synths cheap enough to appeal to the mass market.
early attempts at digital synths still aimed at the high end: while 1979's Fairlight CMI
was adopted by major artists like Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel, and Kate Bush, it cost 25 thousand
dollars, or almost 90 thousand today, making it even more expensive than the original Moog.
but digital synthesis finally broke through in 1983, with the release of the Yamaha DX-7,
the first truly affordable synth. at a price of just under 2 thousand dollars, around 5
thousand today, it still wasn't cheap, but I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people
watching this video have spent at least that much on guitars so, y'know, glass houses and
whatnot.
the DX-7 was a serious piece of machinery with a price tag to match, but at a 3rd the
cost of the Jupiter-8, it was well within the range that a professional musician might
expect to pay for gear, and that relative affordability led to an explosion of interest
in digital synths.
like analog synths before it, the DX-7 allowed the end user almost complete control over
the timbre, or tone, of the instrument: they could modify dozens of different settings
in order to craft the perfect sound.
however, the interface you had to use in order to do that was notoriously difficult, so while
some adventurous artists like Brian Eno dove in headfirst and started inventing their own
sounds, most musicians stuck with one of the 128 presets built into the DX-7. and while
many of those presets saw at least some use, by far the most popular sound, and the one
most strongly associated with the DX-7 today, was a preset called E PIANO 1, designed to
imitate the timbre of the Fender Rhodes.
now, the Rhodes was not a synthesizer: it was an electric piano, which means that while
it had electronic components, the sound was initially generated by a physical process.
when you pressed a key, it caused a hammer to strike a small metal bar, creating a tone
that the Rhodes would pick up, run through some filters, and amplify.
you can think of it like an electric guitar: when you hit the strings, they ring out, and
if the room is quiet enough you can even hear it, but you need to plug in to an amp for
the sound to really project.
but while E PIANO 1 was supposed to sound like the Rhodes, the limitations of the technology
meant it was pretty easy to tell them apart.
here's the Rhodes: (bang) and here's the DX-7 imitating it: (bang) they're clearly related,
but there's also some obvious differences, which were discussed at length by contemporary
musicians.
while it'd be impossible to summarize the entire debate here, Dr. Lavengood keyed in
on two main descriptors that seemed to keep popping up over and over: the Rhodes was considered
"warm", while the DX-7 was "bright".
now, that may seem like a weird distinction since in the real world bright things tend
to also be warm and vice versa, but when discussing an instrument's timbre, these two adjectives
seem to be opposites.
they're fairly imprecise, though: what is a warm tone?
what makes an instrument bright?
what do these words actually mean?
well, the answer to that may lie in their frequency spectra.
you see, on this channel, I often say that when you hear a note, what you're really hearing
is a soundwave with a specific frequency, and that's true, but it's only part of the
story.
most of the time, when you hear a note produced by any physical process, you're actually hearing
a whole family of frequencies smushed together into one apparent tone.
the lowest frequency, called the fundamental frequency, is what defines the pitch of the
note: this note has a fundamental of around 350 hertz, or cycles per second, which happens
to be the pitch we call F. but in addition to that fundamental, the note also has what're
called overtones, additional higher frequencies that are usually multiples of the fundamental,
so in addition to 350 hertz, we're also hearing shades of 700 hertz, 1050, 1400, and so on.
these blend together too well to really come across as their own pitches: they just add
color to the fundamental, and the relative strengths of these overtones is most of what
we call timbre.
this gives us the tools we need in order to examine exactly how E PIANO 1 differs from
the Fender Rhodes, which in turn might help us better understand what makes a tone sound
bright versus warm in general.
which actual timbres do those terms describe?
well, after running both sounds through a frequency analyzer, Dr. Lavengood identified
three main differences between them.
the first is range: while in theory the overtone series continues to infinity, in practice
you're only gonna have a limited number of perceptible overtones on any given instrument.
for the Rhodes, the highest overtone you can actually detect is a little over 3 octaves
above the fundamental, while the range of the DX-7's harmonic series is almost 4. this
matches a lot of other research that shows we tend to hear notes with higher overtones
as brighter.
but there's other differences too.
while the DX-7 has higher overtones, the Rhodes has more of them: it has a total of 11 perceptible
frequencies, compared to E PIANO 1's 9. in fact, E PIANO 1 has a run of 5 overtones in
a row that are just missing.
this gives it a hollow, empty sound, compared to the rich, full tone of the Rhodes. it's
less muddy, but it also lacks a little character, making it feel cold, dispassionate, and mechanical
next to the warmer, more human Rhodes.
but those of you who know the harmonic series may have noticed a problem with those last
two stats: if the Rhodes has a 3 octave spectrum, how can it have 11 overtones? as I mentioned
earlier, overtones are multiples of the fundamental, and if you want to go up three octaves, you
have to multiply that fundamental by 8. this means there's only 8 harmonics that fit within
that range, so where are the other three coming from?
well, as is so often the case, things aren't quite as simple as they seem.
you see, overtones can be broken up into two categories.
the first is harmonic overtones, which are the ones we've been talking about so far:
they're multiples of the fundamental, and they sound in harmony with it.
inharmonic overtones, on the other hand, are not multiples.
they're bonus frequencies, and they clash with the overall structure of the tone.
that might sound like a bad thing and, in a sense, it is: inharmonic overtones are why,
say, a snare drum doesn't really have an apparent pitch.
too many different parts are rattling around at different frequencies, and our ears can't
sort them all into a clear, structured harmonic series with a single, identifiable fundamental.
while you can tune a snare to sound higher or lower, it's never really gonna sound like
an actual note.
but the Rhodes is a lot more careful: while it contains three inharmonic overtones, they're
all fairly high in its frequency spectrum.
they don't start showing up until we're already two and a half octaves above the fundamental,
so while they disrupt the harmonic structure of the pitch, they don't destroy it.
you still hear a note, there's just some extra decoration going on at the top end of the
timbre. this is a product of the way the Rhodes generates sound: again, unlike the DX-7, it
starts with a physical process.
a hammer strikes a metal bar, and that percussive event adds these inharmonic overtones, which
give the note a bit more personality.
you can think of it like the difference between a major triad and major 7th chord: they're
both major, but the 7th makes it feel more nuanced and complex.
taken together, these give us a pretty good idea of what sets these two instruments apart:
the Rhodes has a smaller, more densely packed spectrum with some inharmonicity at the top
end, all of which we perceive as warm, while E PIANO 1 has a broader, emptier range with
only harmonic overtones, which sounds bright instead.
in order to test this result, Dr. Lavengood took her original samples and modified them
to remove these characteristics, cutting out the high end and dampening the frequencies
where the inharmonic overtones appeared, and if you listen to those: (bang) it's a lot
harder to tell which is which.
there's still some difference, but it's much more subtle.
so is that it? well… not quite.
there's one variable we haven't considered yet: humans.
unsurprisingly, the people with the strongest opinions in the Rhodes DX-7 debate were keyboardists,
whose impressions of the instruments were affected not just by their sound but by the
experience of playing them.
it's no secret that our senses are connected: any chef can tell you that how food looks
and smells has a profound impact on how it tastes, so it seems likely that, when playing
an instrument, the way you experience its sound would be inextricably linked to the
tactile experience of creating that sound.
the Fender Rhodes is a physical instrument, producing sound through a physical process.
it responds to your touch: if you press a little harder, the hammer strikes a little
stronger.
you feel a connection to the instrument.
it becomes an extension of your body.
the DX-7, though, can't give you that.
it's touch-sensitive, sure, but that sensitivity is limited, quantized, reduced to numbers
that the computer decides what to do with.
you're not enacting a physical process.
you don't have that same feedback, that sense that you're the one making the sound happen.
the DX-7 doesn't need you.
it just needs a signal.
this creates a disconnect between the player and the instrument, both physically and emotionally,
that would almost certainly affect the perceived character of the sound, especially back when
the technology was unfamiliar and new.
and this affects listeners too: even if you've never played the DX-7, in the world of the
1980s, where digital technology was still fairly new to most people and its powers were
pretty limited, just knowing that what you were hearing was a digital imitation of a
beloved instrument like the Fender Rhodes could make it feel hollow, inhuman, and cold,
so maybe the real reason for the distinctions between the two instruments lies not in their
frequency spectra, but in ourselves.
or, more likely, it lies in a combination of the two.
music is art made of sound, and our experience of it is influenced both by the sound itself
and by the cultural context in which it's made.
I think pretty much any listener from any time period could tell the difference between
this (bang) and this (bang) but would they describe them as warm and bright, respectively?
would they draw the same lines we did, or would they find something new here, some other
emotional framework for the same set of frequencies?
stripped of the context of the 1980s, would we hear these sounds differently? at the time,
E PIANO 1 and the DX-7 became symbols of modernity, of technology, and of the future, and these
days they evoke a sort of retro futurism, a look at what the past thought the present
might be.
it lacks the warmth and humanity of what came before it, replaced with the brightness and
clarity promised by the digital revolution.
those associations are intrinsically linked with our knowledge of the 1980s, but they
begin with the instrument's sound.
if you want to know more about the history of the synthesizer, my friend Volksgeist released
a deep dive on that very topic over on Nebula. it's a great companion piece to this video,
covering everything from early experiments, to the rise of the Moog and the DX-7, all
the way through to the technology's lasting influence today.
in case you don't know, Nebula is a new streaming service built by some of YouTube's top educators,
including Lindsay Ellis, Legal Eagle, Polyphonic, and me.
plus, we've got Adam Neely now! he signed on, like, a month ago I think?
maybe a bit more.
if you want to check out Nebula, we've even made a deal with CuriosityStream where, if
you sign up for CuriosityStream with the link in the description, not only will you get
to watch their massive library with thousands of great documentaries, you'll also get free
access to Nebula along with it, for as long as you remain a CuriosityStream member! and
now's a great time to sign up, 'cause if you use the link in the description you'll also
get a 26% discount on their annual plan.
that's a year of access to both sites starting under 15 bucks.
and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our Patreon patrons for making these videos possible,
and extra special thanks to this video's Featured Patrons, Susan Jones and Jill Sundgaard.
if you want to help out, and help us pick the next song we analyze too, there's a link
to our Patreon on screen now.
you can also join our mailing list to find out about new episodes, like, share, comment,
subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.