Even if you don't know the Roland TR-808 drum machine by name, you’ve almost certainly heard it. If you’re familiar with the percussion on Marvin Gaye’s 1982 hit “Sexual Healing”—those bursts of bass and snare drums amid robotic ticks and claps that collapse atop one another—then you understand how the machine can form a kind of bridge from one moment of breathless desire to the next. That’s the magic of the TR-808, which was released 40 years ago and played a major role in propelling “Sexual Healing” to the top of the charts. Less than a year after the song flooded American airwaves, the 808 was no longer in production, but it would not be forgotten for long: Appearing at the dawn of remix culture, the 808 and its successors soon helped turn the curation of machine-generated beats into its own art form.

In the late 1970s, no one knew how to get realistic-sounding drums out of a machine, so a team of engineers at the Japanese company Roland, led by Tadao Kikumoto, began using analog synthesis—a process that manipulates electrical currents to generate sounds—to create and store sounds that mimicked hand-claps and bass notes and in-studio drums, creating catchy percussion patterns. Unlike most drum machines at the time, the 808 gave musicians remarkable freedom: You weren’t limited to pre-programmed rhythms or orchestrations, which meant you could fashion sounds and stack them on top of one another until you’d created something that had never been heard before. The TR-808 was in many ways a living and breathing studio unto itself.

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