The first book on timbre (or, tone color), and one that covers both classical and popular music.

Timbre is that property of a sound that distinguishes it other than pitch and loudness, for instance the distinctive sound quality of a violin or flute. While the term is obscure, the concept has played an important, implicit role in recent philosophy of sound. Philosophers have debated whether to identify sounds with properties of waves, events, or objects. Many of the intuitive considerations in this debate apply most clearly to timbre qualities. Two prominent forms of timbre physicalism (...) have emerged: one identifying timbre with the spectral composition of proximal waves; the second identifying timbre with the mechanical vibrations at a sound source. I demonstrate that the first possibility is conceptually unsatisfying, while the second fails to meet the standards of rigor established by the color physicalism literature. One response to these worries might be to adopt a more modest, non-reductive realism about timbre, such as the ecological view of J. J. Gibson. (shrink)

Along with pitch and loudness, timbre is commonly described as an audible property of sounds. This paper puts forward an alternative view—that timbres are properties of auditory media. This approach has many advantages. First, it accounts for the frequent attribution of timbres to objects that do not have characteristic sounds. Second, it explains why timbres are attributed not only to ordinary objects, like musical instruments, but also to surrounding spaces and architectural structures. And finally, it provides an original solution (...) to the timbre-constancy problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the question of how emotional qualities can be attributed to musical timbre, an acoustic feature that has proven challenging to explain using traditional accounts of musical emotions. I begin presenting the notion of musical expressiveness, as it has been conceived by cognitivists to account for the emotional quality of various musical elements like melody and rhythm. However, I also point out some limitations in these accounts, which hinder their ability to fully elucidate the emotional (...) expressiveness of timbre, especially when considering it as a result of non-cognitively mediated processes. Consequently, I explore the link between timbre and atmosphere by reviewing anecdotal sources that have characterized timbre in terms of atmosphere. The goal here is to determine if these characterizations should be seen as merely allusive and metaphoric expressions or if they genuinely reveal essential properties of timbre. To achieve this goal, I delve deeper into the notion of atmosphere, and I show that it shares several key traits with the notion of musical emotions as conceived in the cognitivist’s account. Both musical emotions and atmospheres are affectively charged externalities that are apprehended by the subject without cognitive mediation. Drawing from this insight, I conclude that the notion of atmosphere can serve as a valuable tool in explaining the emotional expressivity of timbre without invoking the resemblance-based mechanisms often found in cognitive accounts of expressiveness. (shrink)

Audio features such as inharmonicity, noisiness, and spectral roll-off have been identified as correlates of “noisy” sounds. However, such features are likely involved in the experience of multiple semantic timbre categories of varied meaning and valence. This paper examines the relationships of stimulus properties and audio features with the semantic timbre categories raspy/grainy/rough, harsh/noisy, and airy/breathy. Participants rated a random subset of 52 stimuli from a set of 156 approximately 2-s orchestral instrument sounds representing varied instrument families, registers, (...) and both traditional and extended playing techniques. Stimuli were rated on the three semantic categories of interest, as well as on perceived playing exertion and emotional valence. Correlational analyses demonstrated a strong negative relationship between positive valence and perceived physical exertion. Exploratory linear mixed models revealed significant effects of extended technique and pitch register on valence, the perception of physical exertion, raspy/grainy/rough, and harsh/noisy. Instrument family was significantly related to ratings of airy/breathy. With an updated version of the Timbre Toolbox, we used 44 summary audio features, extracted from the stimuli using spectral and harmonic representations, as input for various models built to predict mean semantic ratings for each sound on the three semantic categories, on perceived exertion, and on valence. Random Forest models predicting semantic ratings from audio features outperformed Partial Least-Squares Regression models, consistent with previous results suggesting that non-linear methods are advantageous in timbre semantic predictions using audio features. Relative Variable Importance measures from the models among the three semantic categories demonstrate that although these related semantic categories are associated in part with overlapping features, they can be differentiated through individual patterns of audio feature relationships. (shrink)

Les mystérieux timbres « à la roue », datant de la seconde moitié du IVe siècle av. J.-C., ont la forme originale d'un cercle divisé généralement en 3 ou 4 secteurs qui contenaient chacun une lettre ou un monogramme. On en a recueilli environ 2 000 exemplaires, surtout dans le Nord de la mer Egée et en mer Noire. Considérés comme originaires de Thasos, ils ont été sans conteste rendus à Akanthos, à partir du moment où, dans les années 1980, (...) on a commencé à y trouver, au pied des remparts, d'abondants vestiges d'ateliers amphoriques (dépotoirs de rebuts et fours). Plus récemment, on a réussi également à distinguer et à interpréter les deux types d'abréviations coexistant sur chacun de ces timbres : d'une part, un nom propre (de magistrat plutôt que de fabricant?) et d'autre part une capacité (entre 2 chous et un métrète, parfois sous la forme des monogrammes {ΠΧ} et {ME}). Ce déchiffrement sera sans doute de quelque utilité dans l'étude formelle des amphores grecques et dans la poursuite de la réflexion sur la finalité de leur timbrage. (shrink)

Much research has explored developing sound representations in language, but less work addresses developing representations of other sound patterns. This study examined preschool children's musical representations using two different tasks: discrimination and sound–picture association. Melodic contour—a musically relevant property—and instrumental timbre, which is less musically relevant, were tested. In Experiment 1, children failed to associate cartoon characters to melodies with maximally different pitch contours, with no advantage for melody preexposure. Experiment 2 also used different-contour melodies and found good discrimination, (...) whereas association was at chance. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2, but with a large timbre change instead of a contour change. Here, discrimination and association were both excellent. Preschool-aged children may have stronger or more durable representations of timbre than contour, particularly in more difficult tasks. Reasons for weaker association of contour than timbre information are discussed, along with implications for auditory development. (shrink)

La frappe de la monnaie et le timbrage des amphores relèvent d’une même technique, celle du sceau, qui est la marque d’une autorité publique. Cette étude analyse les rapprochements entre la composition des types monétaires et celle des emblèmes sur les timbres. Elle relève les nombreux exemples d’emploi de la même image. Elle étudie la signification juridique du scellement, qui a pour effet d’indiquer l’objet dokimon, agréé par la cité. Elle compare les modes de contrôle de la monnaie et des (...) amphores. Enfin, elle met en évidence les coïncidences chronologiques entre l’apparition des timbres et la réforme monétaire de 390 ainsi que le passage des timbres anciens aux timbres récents et le passage du groupe IV et au groupe V, vers 335. La prise de Thasos par Philippe V en 202 pourrait aussi marquer l’histoire des timbres et des monnaies. (shrink)

Suenan timbres, by the Colombian poet Luis Vidales, is an urbanely rural work. The fact that flowers, spiders, cats and landscapes are found in these short poems-vignettes –all of which are a reflection of a city in the process of modernization–; confirms how interested was the author in the idea that his poetic project could erode the barrier separating the cultural and natural spheres. Bearing this in mind, the article attempts to show that the intersubjective dialogue between the two spheres (...) is not peaceful, balanced or horizontal. On the contrary, the article, through a philosophical analysis based on the ideas of ecocriticism, seeks to reveal that underlying this dialogue, there is the desire of modern men to dominate, control and subdue nature to the laws and rule of culture. (shrink)

This study exploratively conducted two investigations of timbre influenced by harmonic loudness. Investigation 1 examined piano timbre preference between non-processed melodies and two kinds of adjustments created via an equalizer–a basic tool used for sound engineering and for producing audio materials. Using the paired comparison method, 98 respondents were surveyed. The results show that in the bass range of the piano sound, the preferred audio material was that produced via an equalizer by reducing the loudness of the 7th (...) and 9th harmonics by 15 dB, while enhancing the loudness of the 8th harmonic by 15 dB. Investigation 2 examined three degrees of the processed melodies—adjusting the harmonics by 15, 10, and 5 dB. The results show that the 15 dB change was the best, while the 10 dB change was the worst. These results provide a new approach to improving the sound timbre for sound engineering and artificial intelligence music production. (shrink)

En este artículo exploramos desde la literatura, por medio de Suenan timbres de Luis Vidales, la dinámica de las nacientes urbes colombianas que inician un proceso acelerado de modernización, carente de un desarrollo adecuado del pensamiento moderno, a la par con los nuevos avances materiales, lo que imposibilita debatir la pertinencia y el proceso de este tipo de transformaciones. Circunstancia que lleva a Colombia a experimentar los idiotismos de la modernización sin modernidad, impidiéndoles a los hombres entender las necesidades y (...) conflictos que genera el progreso. Estas aldeas de principios del siglo XX se convierten rápidamente en proyectos de ciudades determinadas por la aparición de nuevos objetos, creando una atmósfera móvil y ruidosa por oposición a la pasividad de las aldeas, realidad que nos recrea Vidales desde una poética comprometida con los cambios sociales y políticos como poeta de la crítica en Colombia. In this paper, from the literature of Luis Vidales’s Suenan timbres, we explore the dynamics of Colombian rising cities that initiate an accelerated modernization process, deprived of an appropriate development of modern thinking, along with the new material advances, which makes it impossible to debate the relevance and the process followed by these types of transformations. This situation leads Colombia to experience the idiotism of modernization without modernity, impeding men to understand the needs and conflicts generated by progress. These villages from twentieth century beginnings quickly turn into city projects determined by the arrival of new objects, creating a mobile and noisy atmosphere, opposed to villages’ passivity. From poetics committed to social and political change, Vidales recreates reality as a poet of criticism in Colombia. (shrink)

This paper is part of a series in which we had worked in the last 6 months, and, specifically, intend to investigate the notion of timbre through the ecological perspective proposed by James Gibson in his Theory of Direct Perception. First of all, we discussed the traditional approach to timbre, mainly as developed in acoustics and psychoacoustics. Later, we proposed a new conception of timbre that was born in concepts of ecological approach. The ecological approach to perception (...) proposed by Gibson (1966, 1979) presupposes a level of analysis of perceptual stimulated that includes, but is quite broader than the usual physical aspect. Gibson suggests as focus the relationship between the perceiver and his environment. At the core of this approach, is the notion of affordances, invariant combinations of properties at the ecological level, taken with reference to the anatomy and action systems of species or individual, and also with reference to its biological and social needs. Objects and events are understood as relates to a perceiving organism by the meaning of structured information, thus affording possibilities of action by the organism. Event perception aims at identifying properties of events to specify changes of the environment that are relevant to the organism. The perception of form is understood as a special instance of event perception, which is the identity of an object depends on the nature of the events in which is involved and what remains invariant over time. From this perspective, perception is not in any sense created by the brain, but is a part of the world where information can be found. Consequently, an ecological approach represents a form of direct realism that opposes the indirect realist based on predominant approaches to perception borrowed from psychoacoustics and computational approach. (shrink)

As one of the basic elements in acoustic events, timbre influences the brain collectively with other factors such as pitch and loudness. Research on timbre perception involve interdisciplinary fields, including physical acoustics, auditory psychology, neurocognitive science and music theory, etc. From the perspectives of psychology and physiology, this article summarizes the features and functions of timbre perception as well as their correlation, among which the multi-dimensional scaling modeling methods to define timbre are the focus; the neurocognition (...) and perception of timbre are outlined; related experiment findings on the deeper level of timbre perception in terms of neural cognition are summarized. In the meantime, potential problems in the process of experiments on timbre perception and future possibilities are also discussed. Thought sorting out the existing research contents, methods and findings of timbre perception, this article aims to provide heuristic guidance for researchers in related fields of timbre perception psychology, physiology and neural mechanism. It is believed that the study of timbre perception will be essential in various fields in the future, including neuroaesthetics, psychological intervention, artistic creation, rehabilitation, etc. (shrink)

Distinguishing homonymous producers on Greek amphora stamps. Among the producers associated on Greek amphora stamps with an eponymous magistrate (and having thus been in office together during a specific year) there appear rather often (up to 15% of the cases) homonyms. One may thus be surprised that the specialists have never studied the ways that the different production centres distinguished them, in a system of stamping which — whatever its ultimate purpose — must have exercised a certain control (of an (...) administrative character) on the production of amphoras. That is what I have undertaken here, basing myself on a couple of centres most familiar to me : Thasos, Sinope, Herakleia Pontike, Aïnos, Akanthos, Mende, and Ischia. Several solutions (certain, probable or hypothetical) have come to mind, of which the greater part would not have been comprehensible but to the magistrates in charge of stamping. (shrink)

Musical systems develop associations over time between aspects of musical form and concepts from outside of the music. Experienced listeners internalize these connotations, such that the formal elements bring to mind their extra-musical meanings. An example of musical form-meaning mapping is the association that Western listeners have between the major and minor modes and happiness and sadness, respectively. We revisit the emotional semantics of musical mode in a study of 44 American participants (musicians and non-musicians) who each evaluated the relatedness (...) of 96 melody-word pairs. Among the tonal melodies, we manipulated mode (major and minor) and timbre (clarinet and flute) while systematically controlling for other musical factors including pitch register and melodic contour. Similarly, among the English words, we manipulated word affect (happy and sad) while systematically controlling for other lexical factors including frequency and word length. Results demonstrated that participants provided a higher proportion of related responses for major melodies paired with happy words and minor melodies paired with sad words than for the reverse pairings. This interaction between mode and word affect was highly significant for both musicians and non-musicians, albeit with a larger effect for the former group. Further interactions with timbre suggested that while both clarinet and flute conveyed happiness when in the major mode, the clarinet was somewhat more successful than the flute at conveying sadness in the minor mode. Debriefing questionnaires suggested that the majority of the participants, including all of the non-musicians, had no awareness of the major-minor manipulation, and instead directed their attention to register and contour. We argue that the affective character of the major and minor modes is but one example of form-meaning mapping in music, and suggest further exploration of the roles of timbre, register, and contour in conveying musical emotions. (shrink)

Research into voice perception benefits from manipulation software to gain experimental control over acoustic expression of social signals such as vocal emotions. Today, parameter-specific voice morphing allows a precise control of the emotional quality expressed by single vocal parameters, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. However, potential side effects, in particular reduced naturalness, could limit ecological validity of speech stimuli. To address this for the domain of emotion perception, we collected ratings of perceived naturalness and emotionality on voice (...) morphs expressing different emotions either through F0 or Timbre only. In two experiments, we compared two different morphing approaches, using either neutral voices or emotional averages as emotionally non-informative reference stimuli. As expected, parameter-specific voice morphing reduced perceived naturalness. However, perceived naturalness of F0 and Timbre morphs were comparable with averaged emotions as reference, potentially making this approach more suitable for future research. Crucially, there was no relationship between ratings of emotionality and naturalness, suggesting that the perception of emotion was not substantially affected by a reduction of voice naturalness. We hold that while these findings advocate parameter-specific voice morphing as a suitable tool for research on vocal emotion perception, great care should be taken in producing ecologically valid stimuli. (shrink)

German Idealism still dominates most approaches in theoretical biology. This has led to a conception of organisms as tightly regulated self-forming systems where the demands of the whole organism dominate how the parts are coordinated. This article troubles this approach by presenting aspects of biology that refuse to be synthesized into a specific whole. I call this approach “goth biology” as it recognizes the murkiness of systems of knowledge, the loosely composite nature of most living things, and the continual haunting (...) of life by death. Methodologically, I use insights gleaned from the history of post-punk goth music to explore the role of aesthetics, timbres, and forms as elements of lives that bound disparate times and spaces without providing a unified synthesis. A form of biological experience, and a theory of how the body works, goth biology demands that one lose a conception of “self” in order to embrace the complexity of biological interactions. As the goth performance artist Anna-Varney Cantodea recently confessed in an interview: “I have long given up on any goals I might have had,” but this doesn’t keep me from being inspired by everything around me. (shrink)

This is an attempt to describe and explain so-called timbre-based music as a special system of musicking, communication, and psychological and social usage, which along with its corresponding beliefs constitutes a viable alternative to “frequency-based” music. Unfortunately, the current scientific research into music has been skewed almost entirely in favor of the frequency-based music prevalent in the West. Subsequently, whenever samples of timbre-based music attract the attention of Western researchers, these are usually interpreted as “defective” implementations of frequency-based (...) music. The presence of discrete pitch is often regarded as the structural criterion that distinguishes music from non-music. We would like to present evidence to the contrary—in support of the existence of indigenous music systems based on the discretization and patterning of aspects of timbre, rather than pitch. This evidence comes mainly from extensive ethnographic research systematically conducted in eastern European and Asian parts of Russia from the 1890s. It involved the efforts of thousands of specialists and was coordinated by dozens of research institutions, and it has included not just ethnomusicology but linguistics, philology, organology, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and religious and social studies. Much of the data has not been translated into Western languages. Timbre-based tonal organization (TO) differs from that based on frequency in its personal orientation: musicking here occurs primarily for oneself and/or for close relatives/friends. Collective music-making is rare and exceptional. The foundation of timbre-based music seems to have vocal roots and rests on “personal song”—a system of personal identification through individualized patterns of rhythm, timbre, and pitch contour, utilized like a “human voice”—whose sound enables the recognition of a particular individual. The instrumental counterpart of the personalized singing tradition is the jaw harp tradition. The jaw harp is the principal musical instrument for at least 21 ethnicities in Russia, who occupy over half the territory of the country. The evolution of its TO forms the backbone for the development of timbre-based music art. Here, we provide the acoustic, socio-cultural, geographic, and chronological overview of timbre-based music. (shrink)