Timbre Stories

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.

Do you listen to music to change your mood? Do you know what song to put on when you’re feeling sad, or when you want to celebrate something? The effect that music has on our emotions is the main reason why most people listen to (or create) music! Now, one of the first things we all learn when we take music lessons, is that the major mode sounds happy and the minor mode sounds sad. Similarly, you can imagine that something that has a very fast tempo may make you feel quite different emotions compared to music that has a very slow tempo. A lot of research has focused on these individual musical characteristics, but relatively few have researched how differences in timbre can change the emotions of the music listener.

Once upon a time, a little kid started playing a two-stringed bowed instrument. Having already learned the piano for some time, pitch and rhythm were not much of a problem. What intrigued them about this however, is the ease and number of ways they could make the sound of the instrument change. Way easier than on the piano! That excited the little kid more than you could ever imagine. Without knowing, this little kid on a hot tropical island stumbled upon the fascinating world of timbre, not knowing there was a word related to this exciting phenomenon.

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…

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 colors 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.

The world of music is a resplendent and colorful world. In analogy with the visual world in which we live, the sounds that surround us are presented in an immensity of tones and varied nuances. When sounds are used to produce music, performed by musicians, instrumentalists and singers, the variety of tonal colors that they have at their disposal contributes to creating a wide universe of sound details, which enrich the communication of the musical content that the musicians share with their listeners.

I have always been fascinated by how different musical instruments could elicit different emotions/feelings despite them playing the same notes at the same pitch and intensity, without realizing that this was related to timbre…

I first learned about the word "timbre" in my middle school physics class… listening to more contemporary classical music a few years later, "timbre" attained a more human quality to me, distinct from the other dimensions…

I remember having an argument about the pronunciation of timbre. I'll admit that I had only read the term up to that point in my life (I think I was 18 or 19, believe it or not!), and I read it as TIM BRRRR, and not as TAM BOUR. My good friend, and the drummer in my band, informed me I was wrong. I didn't accept it initially. But eventually I did, and I now happily correct anyone who says it wrong.