Timbre versus spectralism

In this essay I would like to present some idea on timbre, as an element of describing the composition program, their relation with new instrumental techniques, ideas with which I have been able to present in my own work. Music with program and timbre. The connectivity between them is very close. The program relieves the listener to understand the content and the perception of timbre. I think that timbre plays a key role here, where with mastery of orchestration and with the help of other musical elements, achieve ideal description and illusion at our mind.

In: Clemens Wöllner, Clemens (Ed.): Body, Sound and Space in Music and Beyond Multimodal Explorations. Sempre Studies in the Psychology of Music. Routledge, London/New York, 2017

In or~hestration treatises, musical features like pitch, instrument registers and timbre are often described with an idea of spatiality. They are perceived in spatial dimensions such as high versus low, thin versus wide, full versus empty (Francoeur

This paper briefly uses some different uses of timbre composition-wise.

1997

Publikationsansicht. 6083873. Timbre and technology :--an analytical partnership : the development of an analytical technique and its application to music by Lutoslawski and Ligeti /--Stephen N. Malloch. (1997). Malloch, Stephen N.--(Stephen Noel). Abstract. Thesis (Ph. ...

CHAPTER 7 T IMBRE is a misleadingly simple and vague word encompassing a very complex set of auditory attributes, as well as a plethora of psychological and musical issues. It covers many parameters of perception that are not accounted for by pitch, loudness, spatial position, duration, and various environmental characteristics such as room reverberation. This leaves a wealth of possibilities that have been explored over the last 40 years or so. We now understand timbre to have two broad characteristics that contribute to the perception of music: (1) it is a multifarious set of abstract sensory attributes, some of which are continuously varying (e.g. attack sharpness, brightness, nasality, richness), others of which are discrete or categorical (e.g., the 'blatt' at the beginning of a sforzando trombone sound or the pinched offset of a harpsichord sound), and (2) it is one of the primary perceptual vehicles for the recognition, identifi cation, and tracking over time of a sound source (singer's voice, clarinet, set of carillon bells), and thus involves the absolute categorization of a sound . The psychological approach to timbre has also included work on the musical implications of timbre as a set of formbearing dimensions in music ).

2016

Timbre, in contrast to pitch and loudness, remains a poorly understood auditory attribute. Persons attempting to understand it may be confused as much by its nature as its definition. Indeed, timbre is a “strange and multiple” attribute of sound (Cadoz, 1991, p. 17), defined by what it is not: it is neither pitch, nor loudness, nor duration. Consider the definition proposed by the American National Standards Institute (1973, p. 56): “Timbre is that attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a subject can judge that two sounds similarly presented and having the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar.” Therefore, timbre is that perceptual attribute by which we can distinguish the instruments of the orchestra even if they play the same note with the same dynamics. The absence of a satisfactory definition of timbre is primarily due to two major problems. The first one concerns the multidimensional nature of timbre. Indeed, it is timbre’s “strangeness” and, even more, its “multipl...

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Timbre, 2020

Signata, 2015