Unveiling the Mystery of Timbre
Timbre and Orchestration Blog | Timbre Stories | May 10th, 2022
Unveiling the Mystery of Timbre
By Anonymous Timbral Mysteries
Timbre has always been thrown around in my music lessons since I was a kid. It seemed to be like a catch-all for anything that couldn’t be described using pitch, rhythm, etc. It somehow meant tone, embouchure, dynamics, resonance, and colour all at once. You just had to guess which one based on context. Everyone loved to use it to elevate their music terminology, but nobody could actually say what it meant. And for a while, I accepted it as another one of life’s great mysteries.
I went through elementary school, high school, CEGEP, and even a few years into my undergrad music courses. It wasn’t until some of my last music courses in undergrad that we finally started turning to timbre. Early music theory courses typically focuses on pitch and rhythm to create form. That is, until you reach 20th century music theory. I remember everyone's eyes going wide when they started throwing math into our theory courses. Row matrices, spectrographs, signals. Most of the others in my class might have been afraid, but I was excited! What a cool way to investigate music!
This is when we revisited timbre, that word that we all pretend to know all about. And now we had to use it to analyze contemporary music. Suddenly, my classmates and I had to face our understanding, or lack thereof, of timbre head on, and we got stuck. If you can't define something, how can you possibly use it as an analysis tool? So, I investigated. I fell down a rabbit hole looking at perceptual timbre studies, its relationship to orchestration practices, timbral melodies (or klangfarbenmelodies, which can mean different things depending on who you ask).
Finally, I had some answers. That perplexing word "timbre" wasn't a huge mystery anymore, or so I thought. Because with every question answered, five new questions took its place. But isn't that what makes it so cool in the first place?
