The cultural significance of timbre analysis: Acase study in 1980s pop music, texture, and narrative

Abstract

This article is in three interrelated parts. In Part 1, I present a methodology foranalyzing timbre that combines spectrogram analysis and cultural analysis. I define a number ofacoustic timbral attributes to which one may attune when analyzing timbre, organized asoppositional pairs of marked and unmarked terms, in order to both aid in spectrogram analysis andaccount for some of this cultural and perceptual work.