Imagining Timbres

Timbre Stories

Dec 2

Timbre and Orchestration Blog | Timbre Storie s | December 2nd, 2021

Imagining Timbres

By Anonymous Imaginary Timbres

I first learned about the word "timbre" in my middle school physics class, just like all the other sound attributes like pitch. But only until I started to listen to more and more contemporary classical music (which focuses a lot on timbral innovation) a few years later did "timbre" attain a more human quality to me, distinct from the other dimensions. Human in that it is protean and elusive, which makes it all the more interesting. Since then timbral thinking for me became an indispensable part in terms of listening to, understanding and analyzing music. A more intimate personal experience on timbre was my first time fiddling with my piano at home. The lowest keys produce such rich sounds like living organisms, and I was fascinated by the dynamic evolution of the sound after its attack, the resonating aspect and how all the partials gradually died out when the sound became more and more metallic.

My own research on timbre now is focused on how people imagine timbral blend and how comparable it is with the perception of real blended sounds, which to me is an implicit aspect of compositional thinking. Composers use inner hearing to compare and adjust instrumentations to achieve certain sonic effects, and I'm mainly interested in how this inner process works. Although timbral analysis has began to raise more interest, I think there's still much room to dive into this realm deeper. I'm fascinated by the potential of introducing acoustic analysis into music analysis where timbre naturally assumes an important role. Given the mercuriality of timbre, a computer-aided analysis focusing on timbre and how it's structured in a piece (and its perceptual origin) could shed light on some hidden and elusive aspects of music and the associated listening experience. Something that can help us understand more how we listen to music. And maybe even more, how people conceive and make music across cultures and time.