A video presenting non-guitarist composer Jason Noble's approach to timbre-based composition for the guitar, discussing issues of notating timbre with various types of mappings. Including musical examples from many pieces created collaboratively with guitarist Steve Cowan.

Ayò Olúrántí is a composer, conductor, organist, and music theorist specializing in pre-colonial Yorùbá music and culture. He has published research on tonality of African languages, polyrhythm in African pianism, intercultural music composition, and orality as a compositional technique.

Minister, musician, and musicologist Braxton D. Shelley is a tenured associate professor of music, of sacred music, and of divinity in the Department of Music, the Institute of Sacred Music, and Yale's Divinity School. A musicologist who specializes in African American popular music, his research and critical interests, while especially focused on African American gospel performance, extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology.

This talk will consider how the timbre of string band music has been racialized through the legacy of blackface, while recovering some of the performed histories (past and present) of Black string band musicians.

Combining original compositions and traditional Haitian tunes with historical broadcasts and contemporary interviews, Leyla McCalla’s remarkable new album, Breaking The Thermometer, offers an immersive sonic journey through 50 years of racial, social, and political unrest as it explores the legacy of Radio Haiti—the first radio station to report in Haitian Kreyòl, the voice of the people—and the journalists who risked their lives to broadcast it.

Joel LaRue Smith is a pianist, composer, arranger, and educator who seamlessly combines jazz, classical, and Afro-Latin music traditions. He has toured the world extensively and performed alongside artists such as Tito Puente, Ellis Marsalis, Kenny Burrell, Mario Bauza, Junior Cook, and Wayne Andre.

Andile Khumalo is a senior lecturer in music theory, orchestration, and composition at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. His compositions are influenced by jazz, different African musics (e.g., the Amhara people, the Nguni people of South Africa, the Amadinda from Uganda), French spectralism, and more.

This research project is supported by a 2021 Global South Fellowship awarded by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. His talk is titled “‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’: An Afrological Approach to the Study of Sonic Representations from the African American Band Tradition”

His current book project is an ethnographic study that draws heavily on Africana studies, musicological analysis, linguistics and performance studies in order to discuss crunk, a subgenre of Atlanta hip-hop, as a performed response to hypersurveillant policing of black youth in the city’s public spaces in the 1990s. This research has direct implications for analyzing contemporary hip-hop subgenres like trap and political movements like #blacklivesmatter.

Dr. Stephanie Shonekan is an ethnomusicologist specializing in popular music of both Africa and the African diaspora, race and identity in music, and protest music. She is the newly appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland

The series will launch with a talk by Dr. Bibian Kalinde entitled, “Unraveling timbre in the music of the marriage ceremony of the Chewa and Bemba in Zambia.”

The blending between sound sources in a joint performance is an important feature relevant in the evaluation and reconstruction of the sound field of an orchestra/ensemble in real life and also in virtual reality domain. I

La recherche est generalement recentrée sur les strategies d'integration et d'adaptation des elements ésthetiques des modes particulieres du Moyen-Orient vers un langage contemporaine occidentale.

There are several key attributes designated by sound experts to characterize timbre. Their use is common but varies greatly depending on the professional field.

Current timbre research has focused overwhelmingly on what George Lewis (1996) describes as Eurological traditions; musical traditions that are based in European-derived beliefs, behaviors, and logics.

Bright (brillant), round (rond), warm (chaud) and rough (rugueux) are four terms vastly used in French language for sound description in sound creation processes such as music performance, orchestration, sound engineering or sound design, yet they lack formal, standardized definitions.

The impression of ensemble sound and blending between musical instruments is an important feature relevant in music composition, orchestration, stage acoustics adaption, and virtual acoustics.

The impression of ensemble sound and blending between musical instruments is an important feature relevant in music composition, orchestration, stage acoustics adaption, and virtual acoustics. Within a larger project, we perform research on musical instruments and the effect of blending.

I will demonstrate how timbre and auditory scene analysis act as a central element in the emergence of musical form in a contemporary aleatoric composition with open instrumentation: all voices are heard (2015) by James Saunders.

Composers for film and video games generally make use of digital audio workstations (Pro Tools, Cubase, etc.) to complete their work. Sample libraries, virtual instruments, and extensive programming in their chosen software allow them to produce realistic sounding mock-ups that serve either as placeholders until their music has been recorded or, in some cases, as the final product itself.

This paper is in ternary A-B-A form; that is, it has two themes and three sections. The A-theme consists of thoughts on the treatment of timbre in ethnomusicology, historically, at present, and in an ideal future. It reviews the infamous problems timbre presents to all scholars of music, and then discusses the special problems of timbre for ethnomusicologists.

Timbre, in its very nature, is abstract. The brain, as we all know, is the most complex system that exists. So, one can only imagine the challenges that can be encountered while investigating timbre processing in the brain. The central focus of timbre research from a neuroscientific point of view, until recently, has been typically on brain responses to changes in acoustic structure or related to sound source categorization (ex: violin vs piano)

In this talk, I first reflect on the “timbral litany” in today’s scholarship: timbre has no standardized language; it lacks a systematic theory; timbre is defined negatively, and so forth. In particular, I focus on the tension between the many claims of timbre’s central important to musical experience, on the one hand, with the reality that we often, on the other hand, talk over and past timbre, abstracting music from timbre’s specificities.

A glance through these proceedings testifies to a rising interest in musical timbre across a multitude of fields, as well as to its under-explored richness, at least until very recently. It also makes evident that timbre is many things to many people and has many functions.