Table of Contents

Introduction
Chasing the Dragon: In Search of Tone in Popular Music
Robert Fink, Zachary Wallmark, and Melinda Latour


I. Genre
Chapter 1
Hearing Timbre: Perceptual Learning Among Early Bay Area Ravers
Cornelia Fales
Chapter 2
The Twang Factor in Country Music
Jocelyn R. Neal
Chapter 3
The Sound of Evil: Timbre, Body, and Sacred Violence in Death Metal
Zachary Wallmark
Chapter 4
Below 100 Hz: Toward a Musicology of Subbass
Robert Fink


II. Voice
Chapter 5
Timbre and Legal Likeness: The Case of Tom Waits
Mark C. Samples
Chapter 6
"The Triumph of Jimmy Scott": A Voice Beyond Category
Nina Sun Eidsheim
Chapter 7
Auto-tune, Labor, and the Pop Music Voice
Catherine Provenzano


III. Instrument
Chapter 8
Hearing Luxe Pop: Jay Z, Isaac Hayes, and the Six Degrees of Symphonic Soul
John Howland
Chapter 9
Santana and the Metaphysics of Tone: Feedback Loops, Volume Knobs and the
Quest for Transcendence
Melinda Latour
Chapter 10
Synthesizers as Social Protest in Early 1970s Funk
Griffin Woodworth
Chapter 11
Crossing the Electronic Divide: Guitars, Synthesizers, and the Shifting
Sound Field of Fusion
Steve Waksman

IV. Production
Chapter 12
Clash of the Timbres: Recording Authenticity in the California Rock Scene, 1966-68
Jan Butler
Chapter 13
The Death Rattle of a Laughing Hyena: The Sound of Musical Democracy
Albin J. Zak III
Chapter 14
The Sound of Nowhere: Reverb and the Construction of Sonic Space
Paul Théberge
Chapter 15
The Spectromorphology of Recorded Popular Music:
The Shaping of Sonic Cartoons Through Record Production
Simon Zagorski-Thomas
Afterword
Simon Frith

About the Author

Robert Fink is Professor of Musicology at UCLA and a past President of IASPM-US. He focuses on music after 1965, with special interests in minimalism, popular music, and the intersection of cultural and music-analytical theory. He has published widely in musicological journals, and is the author of Repeating Ourselves (2005), a book-length study of the minimal music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and others as a cultural reflection of American consumer
society in the mass-media age.

Melinda Latour is Rumsey Family Assistant Professor of Musicology at Tufts University. She has received numerous awards, including the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and the Newberry Library École nationale des chartes Exchange Fellowship. Her work appears in the Journal of Musicology (2015), the Revue de musicologie (2016), and the Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music (forthcoming).

Zachary Wallmark is Assistant Professor of Musicology at SMU Meadows School of the Arts. His research explores the contribution of timbre to affective response, aesthetic judgment, and empathy in popular music and jazz, using methods from musicology and the cognitive sciences.
He is currently at work on a monograph tentatively titled Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge (Oxford). Wallmark is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship (2017-18).

Reviews

"All in all, the contributions of this groundbreaking volume are extremely inspiring. Because of its variety of topics and historical information as well as approaches and concepts, it is likely that the book will be used as a compendium to the study of tone, timbre and sound in popular music that, at the same time, will stimulate manifold new research." -- Martin Pfleiderer, Transposition
"This wide-ranging and ear-opening collection explores the often rich and dynamic space between tone and timbre. Engaging diverse repertories from a variety of interpretive angles, this volume provides a wonderful survey that demonstrates how "pursuing the tone" can be crucial to understanding popular music." -- John Covach, Director, University of Rochester Institute for Popular Music, Professor of Theory, Eastman School of Music
"The Relentless Pursuit of Tone assembles a kaleidoscope of methods for studying timbre in popular music. Its chapters offer new approaches to the study of instruments, voices and technologies; studio production; listening practices and audience reception; music making - whether composed or improvised; performance; aesthetics; and music law. If you are interested in the relationship between sound and music, this collection is essential reading." --
Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction