Playing with timbre
Title: Playing with timbre
Authors: Cornelia Fales, Indiana University
Conference: Timbre is a Many-Splendored Thing — Research Keynote Lecture, July 7th, 2018.
Source URL: https://www.mcgill.ca/timbre2018/program
Playing with Timbre
Cornelia Fales
Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology,
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA
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. The B-theme attempts to demonstrate some of the points made in the previous section with examples from my own work on timbre in music from various parts of the world. I will describe some rough-and- ready solutions devised to work around timbre-related difficulties encountered in the field, and later in analyses of the music and interviews I collected. Many of these “solutions” were temporary and far from satisfactory, and so I return to the A-Theme to discuss the future of timbre studies in ethnomusicology. The paper ends with a call for interdisciplinary efforts to demystify a parameter of profound significance to the experience of music.
A-theme: Timbre in ethnomusicology
It will not surprise anyone that for most of the twentieth century, the parameter of timbre was as often overlooked in ethnomusicology as it was in the fields of Western music history and theory. Unique to ethnomusicology, however, are certain historically recurring patterns of reference to timbre that point to the special irony of its omission from studies of music where it is often the most salient parameter. This section will also briefly trace the history of timbre awareness in ethnomusicology as closely entwined with the development of audio technology for fieldwork and analysis.
The last several decades have seen increasingly sophisticated approaches to timbre research in the various disciplines concerned with music. Here I present a taxonomy of current directions in timbre research in ethnomusicology and related fields, ranging from experimental to theoretical to analytical to purely descriptive. The structure and details of this taxonomy demand reflection as to whether we even need more or different tactics in our analysis and theorizing. A comparison of current investigations of musical timbre to the long evolution of approaches to pitch in Western music leads me to suggest that timbre study is still in its infancy. This section concludes with a discussion of what timbre research still needs in order to begin accumulating data to support paradigmatic approaches equipped with a common vocabulary, a body of established premises, and a developed methodology.
B-theme: Projects in timbre research
In 2008, David Huron published an opinion essay in the journal Nature, warning that the vast diversity of world music was disappearing due to the rampant imperialism of Western music. I agree with Huron that part of the tragedy of music extinction is the concurrent loss of idiosyncratic modes of perception responding to idiosyncratic music. But there are still cultures in corners of the world whose music traditions feature ingenious manipulation of timbre and whose listeners seem to have developed special perceptual proclivities according to the requirements of their music. Experience with music cultures such as these has left me in a state of permanent humility in encounters with unfamiliar music, and a hardline strategic mandate to resist the assumption that what I am hearing is the same as what indigenous listeners are hearing.
In this section, I claim that timbre is one of the most perceptually malleable of musical parameters, and thus one of the most definitive in distinctions between traditional musical forms. Among my particular interests in musical timbre is the phenomenon of spectral fusion. The features that qualify individual concurrent acoustic components for admission into a vertical group are captured by the grouping principles enshrined in the theory of Auditory Scene Analysis (Bregman, 1994). Less well understood is the process of spectral fusion that glues individual components into a single sound. It turns out that there are degrees of fusion. Tones produced on a hand-made instrument by a skillful musician may loosen the glue of a timbral unit, releasing one or more harmonics to express their individuality in the form of pitch. Or, the same tone may subsume alien components that meet the requirements for membership only very imprecisely. A “universal” feature of the world’s music cultures is some form of drone-based music in which the drone is calculated to fade into and out of auditory attention as it is cyclically captured into, then released by, the timbre of another tone.
Alert fieldworkers also discover that spectral fusion is subject to perceptual learning with the realization that timbral elements to which they may not be particularly sensitive, are nevertheless highly salient to indigenous listeners. The extraordinary flexibility of auditory perception has worked to shape another of my research interests: the development of techniques to elicit from indigenous listeners descriptions of what exactly they are hearing at any point in time. These techniques require some inventiveness, since many of the languages I deal with have little or no vocabulary regarding perceived musical sound, and since the information I want involves a degree of metacognition that is uncomfortable for listeners unaccustomed to the practice. This section of the paper will include other examples of timbral manipulation, as well as categories of timbre types implicated in traditional practices.
A-theme reprised: Conclusions
In a general sense, the future of timbre studies in nonempirical fields depends on a sharing of information across disciplines. Ethnomusicologists who intend to focus on specific uses of timbre need to understand the nuances of timbre production and perception; they need to keep up with developing research on timbre and emotion; they need proficiency in some sort of acoustic analysis and methods to relate the results of that analysis to the perception of the music reported by indigenous listeners. The fields of auditory science, on the other hand, could profit from the breadth of view offered by ethnomusicologists well and widely exposed to timbral practices of the world’s musicians. Examples of auditory principles—both demonstrated and sometimes contradicted—are plentiful in the collective experience of field workers. Many of these same researchers have discovered aspects of timbre perception of importance to listeners about which little work has been done. (Why are the mechanics of perceptual fusion still mysterious, or worse, conflated with the operations of feature binding?) From a practical standpoint, scientists who want to do true cross-cultural research could benefit from the expertise of ethnomusicologists in the often-tricky business of dealing with indigenous musicians and listeners on their own turf. Finally, if the disciplines engaged in subjects relevant to timbre want to explore the territory separating learned and innate perceptual proclivities, I submit that there are few populations more suited to the project than ethnomusicologists.
References
Huron, D. (2008). Lost in music, Nature, 453, 456-457.
Bregman, A. (1994). Auditory scene analysis: The perceptual organization of sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.