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Emily Dolan (Brown University)

Timbre Worlds

Much scholarship on timbre has emphasized its ineffability, as well as the failure of theory and language to account for timbre’s power, function, and effect. And yet, despite these challenges, we still manage to talk a lot about timbre, in both formal and informal ways. In this pair of workshops, Prof. Dolan delved into classic and recent readings in timbre studies to think about the intersections between timbral theory and timbral convention. Sessions unfolded with a mix of large and small group discussions. In addition to the assigned readings, participants were asked to do a small interview project in preparation for our session. 

Daphne Tan (University of Toronto)

Music Analysis and Timbre

It’s an exciting time to attend to timbre: in recent years, music analysts have employed new tools, technologies, and approaches to capture and describe timbral experiences. This workshop surveyed a range of published music analyses with timbre as a central focus, including those for specialists and those for the general public. Together, the group studied how analysts convey their observations (through words and visual representations) and consider the interpretive rewards and limitations of different modes of analysis. The session also broadened its discussion to ask about relationships, overt or inferred, between music and the analyst.

Michael Tenzer (University of British Columbia)

Ethnomusicology of Orchestration

An ethnomusicology of orchestration historicizes the concept to encompass traditions in which orchestration is not (or only minimally) an expressive choice, but something constrained by nonautonomous factors. Among these are environmental and technological affordances shaping organology, place-based acoustics of performance contexts, social structures in which ensemble makeup affirms group identity or community function, and invariable musical roles developed for different instruments in a given ensemble or genre. All of these must adapt to the laws of human cognition. They also hang on each tradition’s construal of the musical entity itself, that is, the ontology of the inner thing we call “music” in each culture, and how its transformation into performed sound materializes these factors. A still broader view suggests an evolutionary thread connecting the timbral strategies evolved for animal biophony, to the worldings of traditional music, to the rise of timbre as an individual’s identity marker in contemporary life.

Anthony Tan (University of Victoria)

Sound as Material: Perspectives on a Timbral Discourse

Considering timbre as the salient dimension of compositional practice raises questions about materiality, transformation, organization, and expression. In this session, Prof. Tan presented artistic and conceptual approaches to timbre in his own music and from diverse genre repertoire. Participants engaged in creative exercises exploring timbre translation and typological orchestration. 

Caroline Traube (Université de Montréal)

Deciphering Timbre Through the Prism of Acoustics and Psychoacoustics

From the point of view of psychoacoustics, timbre is a perceptual attribute of sound that depends on many spectro-temporal characteristics : the shape of the dynamic envelope, the duration and more or less noisy nature of the attack, the harmonic or inharmonic nature of the frequency components, the sustained or unsustained nature of the source, the distribution of energy in the various frequency regions of the spectrum, the presence of formants or particular resonances, modulation effects, and so on. In this workshop aimed at participants from all disciplines (not requiring any prior knowledge in musical acoustics), all these parameters were clearly defined and illustrated. ACTOR's project served as a source of pedagogical material. Timbre semantics was also discussed in relation with the acoustic nature of sounds. As an application, students were guided in the use and exploration of spectral analysis software such as .