'What is timbre?' vs. 'What can we do with timbre?' Picking the right questions
Title: 'What is timbre?' vs. 'What can we do with timbre?' Picking the right questions.
Authors: Stephen McAdams, McGill University
Conference: Timbre is a Many-Splendored Thing — Opening Address, July 5th, 2018.
Source URL: https://www.mcgill.ca/timbre2018/program
‘What is Timbre?’ versus ‘What Can We Do with Timbre?’ Picking the Right Questions
Stephen McAdams
Department of Music Research, Schulich School of Music, McGill University,
Montreal, QC, Canada
A glance through these proceedings testifies to a rising interest in musical timbre across a multitude of fields, as well as to its under-explored richness, at least until very recently. It also makes evident that timbre is many things to many people and has many functions. Understanding this elusive, because multifarious, concept will require a harmonization and interconnection across disciplines of concepts, vocabulary, definitions, and analytical approaches. It will also require us to identify the right questions to ask. Here are two sets of them that seem important to me.
What is timbre?
This question has generated unending, and in many cases unfruitful, debate in many fields and across fields. Aside from the negative definition, which only tells us what timbre isn't, many other conceptions abound (see McAdams, 2013; McAdams & Goodchild, 2017).
Some people consider timbre as a sounding object, such as the timbre of a clarinet. This conception presumes some thing that is common to all clarinets played at any pitch or dynamic with any articulation and embouchure configuration by any clarinetist. Furthermore, this thing is different for every kind of instrument. But then why do people writing or talking about the clarinet give different names to different registers in reference to the perceived sound qualities: chalumeau, throat tones, clarion, altissimo? If a clarinet has a timbre, how can it have different timbres? And how far does this generalized instrument timbre (or macrotimbre) apply to the whole clarinet family from piccolo to contrabass? And why then is it so difficult for people to recognize that sounds in different registers of a given instruments or voices are coming from the same sound source?
Other people consider timbre as a physical sound event: “listeners were presented with a timbre.” This conception of timbre has led to all kinds of misconceptions and given much fodder for circular musings among philosophers and epistemologists of sound, and even the occasional music theorist, musicologist or perceptual psychologist. In particular, it leads to difficulties in traversing the inevitable gap between the realms of the physical or material on the one hand, and the perceptual or conceptual on the other. If it's a physical event, then what is in the mind of the listener?
Another conception of timbre is as a perceptual quality that derives from certain acoustic properties of sound events. This conception has led to the spontaneous generation of multitudes of quantitative “timbre” descriptors in psychoacoustics and music information retrieval (Siedenburg, Fujinaga & McAdams, 2016). Such audio descriptors are derived from different acoustic representations of a sound signal, which one attempts to correlate with various measurable perceptual properties, such as dissimilarities among sounds. But if the pure sensory information were enough to explain perceptual ratings, why are these ratings so often difficult to model satisfactorily? Extensions of this approach accept that the knowledge a listener has accumulated about categories of mechanical or electroacoustic devices that produce sounds can also affect listeners’ judgments. But to what extent do the results of these kinds of studies, often conducted on isolated sounds, generalize to performed musical sequences and various combinations of instruments?
Timbre may also be characterized as a set of qualia related to “perceptual” dimensions that can be characterized with verbal descriptions. This approach presumes a one-to-one or at least very tight relation between perception and language. But are we always able to find the right words for all the wonderfully subtle qualities that we perceive in musical sounds and their blended combinations? And if not, what are the limits of these linguistic characterizations?
Another recent notion concerns timbre as an emergent property of many sounding objects, referred to as “polyphonic timbre.” This notion is thought to characterize the sound of groups of instruments, particularly in pop music, and contributes to the recognition of a specific band or musical genre. But is this really “timbre” per se or does it stand in relation to timbre as a perceptual construct like harmony stands in relation to pitch?
What can we do with timbre?
From the point of view of the musician and composer, how we characterize timbre is not as important as how it can be used musically (see McAdams & Goodchild, 2017; Goodchild & McAdams, 2018).
Timbre as a perceptual property arises from the spectral fusion of acoustic information into a perceived event. How can new timbres be constructed or transformed in the mind of a listener through instrumental blends, sound synthesis and processing, or mixing and editing?
Timbre affects auditory stream formation and the shape of and memory for musical patterns. What role do similarities and differences in timbre play in the organization of sequences of musical events into one or more auditory streams or in the formation of foreground and background layers in orchestral music and other sonic textures? What timbral properties make some sounds more salient than others and thus attract a listener’s attention to them so they occupy the perceptual foreground? In what ways can timbral variations across a musical sequence be used to create rhythmic patterns, making some events seem more accented and, for example, giving the overall pattern a sense of groove in pop music? Do the perception and memory of timbre allow us to perceive timbre intervals and contours and to recognize re-presentations of them with different timbres as preserving the timbral relations?
Sudden changes in timbre can structure music into spans of similar timbres set off by these changes. How can timbral contrasts be employed to segment sequences at different hierarchical levels in order to structure music through changes in instrumentation or sound processing? Can orchestration—as the choice, combination and juxtaposition of timbral qualities—reinforce or contradict structures formed of pitch and duration? Under what conditions do timbre-based structures dominate pitch-based structures? What are the possibilities of sculpting smaller-scale and larger-scale spectral shapes and timbral trajectories that evolve through time, all the while maintaining a perceptual coherence and imparting a dynamic form to the music?
And timbre has other functions as well. What timbral properties contribute to the establishment of a sonic identity (of a performer, a band, a composer, a musical genre, a gender, a political or social status)? How can timbre be used to create emotional tone and fashion an emotional trajectory for a listener?
Whither timbre research?
Many questions. Much to do. Time to get started!
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the Quebec FRQSC, the Canadian NSERC and SSHRC, and Canada Research Chairs programs.
References
Goodchild, M., & McAdams, S. (2018). Perceptual processes in orchestration. In E. Dolan & A. Rehding (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of timbre. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. http://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.013.10
McAdams, S. (2013). Musical timbre perception. In D. Deutsch (Ed.), The psychology of music (3rd ed., pp. 35-67): New York, NY: Academic Press.
McAdams, S., & Goodchild, M. (2017). Musical structure: Sound and timbre. In R. Ashley & R. Timmers (Eds.), The Routledge companion to music cognition (pp. 129-139). New York, NY: Routledge.
Siedenburg, K., Fujinaga, I., & McAdams, S. (2016). A comparison of approaches to timbre descriptors in music information retrieval and music psychology. Journal of New Music Research, 45(1), 27-41.