My Journey Into Timbre Space
Timbre and Orchestration Blog | Timbre Stories | February 2nd, 2022
My Journey Into Timbre Space
By Stephen McAdams
I grew up in a musical household where everyone played different instruments (dad—sax & bass clarinet; mom & baby brother—clarinet; sister—flute; other younger brother—bassoon; everyone—piano) and I learned several instruments over the years—piano, clarinet, bass clarinet, oboe, and then later percussion, viola, shakuhachi). We listened to a lot of classical, folk and jazz, and I later became intrigued by the musics of other cultures with wildly different instruments and sonorities, and so sound colours galore were always available. The discovery of contemporary music and electronic music then blew the door open even wider to the wonderful world of timbre as a musician making some attempts at music composition: I just wanted to explore new and fascinating sound worlds.
Upon leaving music at De Anza College in California and heading into studies of experimental psychology at McGill University, where I had the good fortune to have Al Bregman as my research supervisor, my first perception experiments were on the role of timbre (now I called it that and it was maybe Al who gave me that vocabulary) in the organization of musical streams. We tend to track sound sequences whose constituent sounds are similar in timbre and to separate different timbres into overlapping streams.
Presenting the issues of how we hear musical streams in a computer music conference in Chicago, and asking a bunch of questions in the talk about the role of timbre, I had the great luck to have sparked the interest of one of the pioneers of timbre research, the inimitable David Wessel. We had some wild and wooly exchanges, and he invited me to come to Paris where he worked at the computer music research institute IRCAM. Needless to say, the world of timbral exploration grew even wider working with composers, scientists and engineers on issues in contemporary music and, in particular, electroacoustic music. There, some of the foundational work on timbre perception and modeling in timbre spaces was done, working with the brilliant data analyst Suzanne Winsberg, and the intellectual atmosphere encouraged the pushing of conceptual boundaries about what timbre is and what it does in music.
But it was coming back to McGill many years later, that everything came together with psychoacoustic, cognitive and music-analytic approaches to timbre, which necessarily led to thinking about orchestration itself as an object of humanistic and scientific study. And so was ACTOR born.
