Timbre is a Many-Splendored Thing Cornelia Fales Timbre is a Many-Splendored Thing Cornelia Fales

Playing with timbre

This paper is in ternary A-B-A form; that is, it has two themes and three sections. The A-theme consists of thoughts on the treatment of timbre in ethnomusicology, historically, at present, and in an ideal future. It reviews the infamous problems timbre presents to all scholars of music, and then discusses the special problems of timbre for ethnomusicologists.

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Timbre in the brain

Timbre, in its very nature, is abstract. The brain, as we all know, is the most complex system that exists. So, one can only imagine the challenges that can be encountered while investigating timbre processing in the brain. The central focus of timbre research from a neuroscientific point of view, until recently, has been typically on brain responses to changes in acoustic structure or related to sound source categorization (ex: violin vs piano)

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Timbre eternal

In this talk, I first reflect on the “timbral litany” in today’s scholarship: timbre has no standardized language; it lacks a systematic theory; timbre is defined negatively, and so forth. In particular, I focus on the tension between the many claims of timbre’s central important to musical experience, on the one hand, with the reality that we often, on the other hand, talk over and past timbre, abstracting music from timbre’s specificities.

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