It envelops us like the thumping bass of the TR-808. Heartbreak is the demand to feel outside of ones’ individuated self.
Heartbreak is feeling outside of oneself. Heartbreak elucidates how the violence of racial capitalism inaccurately reproduces black life. Heartbreak represents the reverberating echoes of our collective plantocratic historical pasts in the present. Heartbreak works with and in excess of the bio-mythological heart, the hollow muscular organ and its narratives of affectively variegated tenderness and loss. Heartbreak captures, at least a little, those injuriously loving emulations of what it means to be Black and human within the context of white supremacy. We situate the 808s as one of many enunciations of black studies, as heavy waves and vibrations that intersect with and interrupt black life discursively and physiologically, as heartbreak. 5 Emulations, like 808s, are injuriously loving.
#808S AND HEARTBREAK TYPE BEAT SERIES#
This is especially meaningful, since a “lack of interest drove second-hand prices down and made it an attractive source of beats for techno and hip-hop producers.” 4 Emulation, in this sense, honors black creative labor and invention-the boom-bap-blonk-clap of 808s-as diasporic literacy, yet also understands this work as a series of inaccurate repetitions that disclose the awful, the hurtful, and the intrusive. We thus consider the insights developed in “A Physically-Informed, Circuit-Bendable, Digital Model of the Roland TR-808 Bass Drum Circuit,” and overlay them with the mathematics of Black life, in order to think through the mechanics of emulation with and outside of itself. The authors dive into the mechanic circuitry and deep beats and bass of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, but say little about its significance for the musical, sonic, and textural sciences that are imagined alongside the unit. They write, “A bass drum note is produced when the μPD650C-085 CPU applies a common trigger and (logic high) instrument data to the trigger logic.” 3 They pay close attention to the circuit behavior of the 808. 2 They find remnants of Ace Tone’s 1964 R1 Rhythm Ace. The authors take the machine apart, break it up, and think about inabilities, noting that misinformation and misconceptions about the sound, the beats, the bass of the original 808s has led to the inability to emulate it.
#808S AND HEARTBREAK TYPE BEAT SOFTWARE#
Smith III, write that the drum machine was “considered somewhat of a flop-despite significant voice design innovations, disappointing sales and a lukewarm critical reception seemed clear indicators that digitally-sampled drum machines were the future.” 1 Centralizing an analysis of the circuits, sub-circuits, and software of the Roland TR-808, the authors suggest that, since its discontinuation there has been an inability to digitally replicate the analog sounds of the Roland TR-808.
In an article about the Roland TR-808, discontinued by Roland in 1984, Kurt James Werner, Jonathan S. This essay was originally published in PROPTER NOS. By Katherine McKittrick and Alexander G. Weheliye