What Is SYNTHWAVE? - A Musical Analysis

#80s #synthwave #retrowave #chillwave #retrosynth #80smusic #synthesiser #riseofthesynths #nostalgia #80smovies #synth #1980s #horrorwave #vaporwave #darksynth

Let’s step back into the 80s as we look at the awesome genre that is Synthwave. Here we’ll be looking at the music's visuals/general aesthetics, and subgenres. We then go into quite a bit of detail on certain musical aspects of synthwave such as harmony, melodic features, and instrumentation.

00:00 What is Synthwave?
00:23 Synthwave Emerges
01:57 Aesthetics
03:47 Subgenres: Horrorwave
04:37 Darksynth
05:36 Chillwave
06:08 Vaporwave
07:03 Nostalgia
08:32 Musical Features: i.Scoring
09:30 ii.Textures
11:00 iii.Harmonies
12:57 iv.A very particular set of notes
13:13 The Synthwave Lick
17:02 The Outrun Rise
20:23 Further Listening
20:52 I Heart 80s
22:10 Mono no Aware

ALL film, music video, meme, & audio clips are included under FAIR USE. This is an educational video discussing features of a music genre in detail. The use of all song/video clips are transformative in nature and not detrimental to the market, nor are they substituting/in competition with the original works.

NOTES:
(4:33) Ennio Morricone is of course credited with the excellent score to The Thing. John Carpenter also contributed towards this; the point being made here is the soundtracks for the 3 films cited feature keyboards/synths heavily.
(12:30) Not claiming The Police invented the Synthwave Lick decades before synthwave actually became a thing. It was just very interesting to explore a musical coincidence in more detail!
(20:09) RIP Matthew Perry

SYNTHWAVE CHANNELS:
   / @newretrowave  
   / @theprimethanatos  
   / @neros77  
   / @the80sguy  

RISE OF THE SYNTHS Documentary Film: https://theriseofthesynths.com/ 

NOSTALGIA STUDIES (cited at 7:35)
1 (2008) - https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/63844/1/Z...
2 (2013) Batcho, K. I. (2013). "Nostalgia: Retreat or support in difficult times?" (American Journal of Psychology)
3 (2012) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22390...

CREDITS:
End Music:
'Retrowave' by Alexey Anisimov

Some fonts created by
a href="https://www.textstudio.com/"Text effect/a

Software used: Shotcut, Audacity, Canva.

For a list of credits for certain images/videos used in this video, please see the link below.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...
If you spot something that needs a credit and it is missing from this list (absolutely not intentional), please let me know and I will add it accordingly.