Musical Synthesizers of the 1980s

Lesson Plan - Get It!

Audio:

The music of the 80s is as popular as ever!

There are countless radio stations that replay the best songs of the era, 80s pop stars keep themselves busy touring and playing concerts for fans old and young, and the music videos that defined the decade still fetch millions of views on Internet websites.

If there is a sound that captures the decade, it might be the sound of the synthesizer. A synthesizer is a musical instrument that runs on electricity and produces sound. The element that makes the synthesizer such a unique and special type of musical instrument is its range. Synthesizers can produce a staggering array of sounds because they are able to build sounds from their most simple components.

The music you listened to in the beginning relies almost exclusively on synthesizers for its sounds. Listen to an isolated track from the same song, without the vocals, drums, and other production.

• How would you describe some of the sounds you hear?

Now, listen to just the synthesizer track from the song above.

A Ha Take On Me Keyboard Only from VEVO // Warner Music Group:

Listen to some of the other great songs of the 1980s.

1. Choose at least three of the songs in the interactive below — you probably won’t be able to resist listening to them all!
2. Carefully try to isolate the synthesized sounds.
3. Choose at least one sound per song and describe it using some of the words found on this list, Interesting Sensory Words, courtesy of Susan Nixon.
4. Share your findings with your parent or teacher, and then discuss the following questions:

• How could you tell synthesized sounds from other sounds, like percussion, voice, and conventional musical instruments?
• How do you think synthesizers create different kinds of sounds?
• If you were to classify all different possible sounds, how would you go about it?

There are many different types of synthesizers, and the technology of music production is only becoming more sophisticated. There are a few techniques that the earliest pioneers of synthesizers used and that reached their peak in the analog synthesizer technology of the 1980s — that 80s sound!

In the Got It? section, learn the basic principles on which those synthesizers were based.