Synth

Synthpop is a style of popular music in which the synthesizer is the dominant musical instrument. It is most closely associated with an era between the end of the 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s when the synthesizer first became a practical and affordable instrument. more...

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The style developed as musicians such as Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Ultravox, and Devo embraced the synthesizer as a lead instrument, taking advantage of its unique sound and capabilities.

Characteristics

While most current popular music in the industrialized world is realized via electronic instruments, synthpop has its own stylistic tendencies which differentiate it from other music produced by the same means. These include the exploitation of artificiality (the synthesizers are not used to imitate acoustic instruments), the use of mechanical rhythms and "feel", the use of vocal arrangements as a counterpoint to the artificiality of the instruments, and the use of ostinato patterns as an effect. Synthpop song structures are generally the same as in "regular" pop music.

History

Influences

Composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen influenced synthpop and to a bigger extent the industrial movement. Although synthesizers had been used in rock music in the 1960s, notably by The Beatles, the instruments were highly complex, temperamental, and expensive. Synthesizers became more widely used by progressive rock and jazz fusion groups such as Pink Floyd, Yes, Return to Forever, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Weather Report, and by the mid-1970s, electronic art music musicians such as Wendy Carlos, Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, and the Krautrock-influenced German band Kraftwerk were among the artists who experimented with them. In the mid seventies, Suicide, a duo from New York, combined vocals and keyboard in a harsh, avantgarde and often very controversial form. Suicide would influence others in the 1980s, such as Soft Cell and the Pet Shop Boys. Producer Giorgio Moroder used them on records by disco artists, notably Donna Summer, giving rise to the subgenre terms "Eurodisco" and "Hi-NRG," further popularised in the early 1980s by Moroder and fellow German producers Jack White and Harold Faltermeyer, working with predominantly female artists, such as Irene Cara and Laura Branigan, Berlin and Stacey Q.

1979 and early-to-mid 1980s

The synthpop genre began to surface in 1979 and continued to evolve and expand in the early 1980s. Albums like Replicas by Gary Numan and Tubeway Army, Numan's solo LP The Pleasure Principle, Dare by the Human League, Soul Mining by The The and Metamatic by John Foxx typified the early synthpop sound.

Read more at Wikipedia.org