ABSTRACT

The development of rock has in fact always been linked to its technology, whether the electric guitar or the fully digital sampler and sequencing studio. In the 1960s, the work of producers such as Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and George Martin ultimately led to recording replacing the printed score as the "text" for a song. Musical semiotics is a rather young but burgeoning field, Leonard Ratner's study of "topics" in Classic music was followed by a number of studies in musical coding, including those by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Kofi Agawti, Robert Hatten, Bero Tarasti, and Raymond Monelle. Sonic historiography became much more common in the 1970s, a decade when rock music became increasingly imbued with a sense of its own history—precisely as American and British societies were engaged with a fascination for nostalgia. The introduction to "Stethoscope" begins with a simple twoeighth-note motive between snare and bass drum; this figure is developed using an additive process.