Analogizing Timbre
Timbre and Orchestration Blog | Timbre Stories
Analogizing Timbre
By Anonymous Timbral Analogies
January 11th, 2023
Recently, I have been toying with new ways of describing timbre to non-musicians. Since we rely on metaphorical language so much of the time, I started to think about other disciplines and art forms that I could draw from. Much of our timbre vocabulary comes from the art world (e.g. bright, dark, harsh, muted, etc.) so I wanted to avoid that realm, but I maintained that the visual domain was an appropriate place to analogize timbre.
Over the pandemic, I became fascinated with design; specifically typeface design. Typefaces and fonts are all around us and have incredible communicative ability, yet most of the time we focus on the linguistic meaning of the collections of letters and implicitly make-meaning from the design of the font. Consider these two ads:
or
If you need someone to watch children, who are you going to call? Lest you thought this was only analogous to music, it has been shown that composers that change the default fonts are more likely to lose blind composition competitions; and that those composers are often women. The way a word appears to us carries both an inter-subjective meaning and a tremendous amount of additional socio-cultural, affective, identity-laden information.
This is timbre in music. Is a melody the same melody regardless of what instrument it is played on? In many ways, yes. The pitch relations can be extracted and comprehended as an idealized (potentially timbre-less) melody. Yet, the choice of instrument, the playing technique, or some other timbral facet is always part of the auditory scene. As such, it effects the way we interact with musical stimuli. Is the Theme from Jaws played on a piccolo still the Theme from Jaws? Kind of, but the timbre, the register, the performative effort of the bowing all come through the recording and make the theme what it is.
As it will now prove impossible to walk around without noticing the fonts used in everywhere, it is my hope that you will begin to listen to music and pay attention to timbre. How is timbre being used musically? How do the timbres effect the musical result? What information does timbre bring and how can you use that information to make meaning? Timbre, like font design, is a fascinating, but overlooked aspect of life that we continue to take for granted.
