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Everything we can't describe in music
- taco_emoji 3y ago"Terroir" is a terrible way to metaphorize timbre. The only similarity is that they're both hard to describe. Terroir is there before the wine is made and can't really be controlled by the winemaker (except insofar as they choose where to plant or what grapes to blend). Timbre is absolutely under the control of the musician.
- pimlottc 3y agoI think the sense is more they're both about hundreds of unique physical characteristics, some of which are perhaps unquantifiable. The shape of an instrument, the material used, the type of strings, their tension, the temperature and humidity in the room. The way each player holds it, the size of their hands, the specific strength of their fingers. Some of these factors stay constant, others change from day to day or player to player. The sum of all of these together creates a specific timbre.
- btown 3y ago> Terroir is there before the wine is made and can't really be controlled by the winemaker (except insofar as they choose where to plant or what grapes to blend). I've met winemakers who think of planting in terms of multigenerational experiments with highly intentional controls for different aspects of soil and micro-climate that may vary on a scale of a single meter, who work to find and train their successors because they will not see the results of some of these experiments in their lifetimes; winemakers who absolutely understand that blending is not just a linear combination of the characteristics of blended wines, but a truly complicated system where certain flavors may heighten others; winemakers who rely on centuries of experience in how funguses and other microorganisms can be used in safe and flavor-enhancing ways. Winemaking is engineering, just as musical instrument design is (both physical and digital), and just as building a startup is. The presence of human subjectivity as an evaluating oracle in a complex system does not imply that its creators work without intention or without rigorous systems-level thinking.
- ta2112 3y agoAs a string player, terroir strikes me as a beautifully appropriate way to describe timbre. My instrument was constructed in the 19th century, probably in Germany. The luthier, their choice of wood, the shape, the workmanship, the strings, the bow, the weather, the player, the room, the mood, the other players all affect the sound. A large portion of the job of an instrumentalist is choosing which tools to use. There are always compromises, and many variables that effect the timbre simply are before a note is played, and have to be worked with.
- artimaeis 3y agoI think this is just another point of frustration with trying to define timbre. There's definitely some points directly under control: attack and brightness come to mind. Then there's some that are less directly under control: the room and the instrument itself. It's no accident that musicians spend a lot of money on instruments -- even electric guitar players -- an instrument that is electronically amplified and often distorted and otherwise augmented -- will have strong feelings about the particular type of guitar they use. Leaving shape-based decisions out of it (and pickups), hollow bodies are going to produce a different sound than solid. Different wood types will produce different tonal characteristics. So the things that are directly controlled are less like terroir, more like choice of grape used maybe? While the make of the instrument, the shape of the room a recording was made in, these are much more like terroir I think. But it's probably just not a great metaphor.
- mrob 3y ago>Different wood types will produce different tonal characteristics. True for acoustic guitars, but for electric guitars this is thoroughly debunked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36106674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36106674
- artimaeis 3y agoTIL! I grew up hearing about it so much from the broader guitar community that I just took it as truth. The idea holds across many acoustic instruments though.
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- makeitdouble 3y agoThanks, that analogy bugged me a lot and I couldn't get why a farmable region was similar to a variable sound envelope. A terroir is totally describable, as by definition you have uniform geological and climatic properties (on the other hand if it can't be delimited it's not a terroir)
- tarentel 3y agoAs a synth enthusiast I generally think of timbre in relation to "real" instruments, brass, strings, piano, etc. In the article they mention there are as many as 10 dimensions but don't actually define what those are. Timbre is something I've thought about a lot but nailing down a more general classification seems pretty challenging.
- wrs 3y agoThat’s funny, I’m more likely to describe “real” instrument timbres in synth terms, many of which I bet relate closely to the 10 dimensions. Oscillator waveform, envelopes, filter shape/cutoff, resonance…
- odyssey7 3y agoArnold Schoenberg observed the deep connection between music, perception, and cognition; anticipated composers applying timbral control as is now commonly done with synthesizers; and apparently did not anticipate non-subtlety of the effect in EDM: "I think the tone becomes perceptible by virtue of tone color [timbre], of which one dimension is pitch. ... Pitch is nothing else but tone color measured in one direction. Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colors that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call 'melodies', progressions, whose coherence evokes an effect analogous to thought processes, then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colors of the other dimension, out of that which we call simply 'tone color', progressions whose relations with one another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of pitches. That has the appearance of a futuristic fantasy and is probably just that. But it is one which, I firmly believe, will be realized. ... Tone-color melodies! How acute the senses that would be able to perceive them! How high the development of spirit that could find pleasure in such subtle things!" -- Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 1911, toward the end of chapter 22. Personally, I anticipate that if humanlike AGI is achieved, then it will understand the illusion of music. Not merely because music understanding is an attribute of humanlike, but because there must be something intrinsic in the process of human cognition that causes the illusion of music occur. Music understanding could be viewed as an essential waypoint on the path to AGI.
- andoando 3y agoI had a simple thought a couple years ago that still fascinates me. If you do something as simple as "clap clap clap" (with equal measures of time), you can naturally relate it to any other set of sounds with that simple pattern (ABABA). moreover, there is a 1 to 1 relation of this abstraction in space, where one can represent the sounds as marks on a screen (as I have done here for example, as "clap clap clap, X X X, - - -, or whatever). Despite the different sensory systems (sound, or visual) and the difference in actual data (I don't know how many photons or audio waves entering your brain), we can abstract them down and understand/relate them with a simple pattern.
- odyssey7 3y ago
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- cainxinth 3y agotldr: Timbre, the unique quality of a sound that distinguishes different voices or instruments from one another, is complex to define and measure and is often overlooked in music theory, which tends to focus more on pitch, rhythm, and harmony.
- navane 3y agoTimbre is what makes the violin sound different from the bassoon, what makes the strings in general gives them their sound, and brass theirs. Timbre is what makes a singers voice unique. Classical composers had a set of fixed timbres to play with, each instrument having their own. With synthesizers everything is possible.
- nicklecompte 3y ago"everything is possible" except for a synthesized instrument that actually has the expressive range of a real violin or saxophone. Even a synthesized piano is noticeably lifeless compared to the real thing (synthesized piano bass notes are especially thin).
- relaxing 3y agoMy trombone is lousy at reproducing the sound of a cello, but I don’t consider it inferior. More to the point, the synthesizer has more options for expressiveness through change in timbre, glissando, microtones, etc.
- kazinator 3y agoBut nobody made the claim that everything is possible with a trombone.
- postalrat 3y agoIs there a synthesizer that claims anything is possible?
- 8bitsrule 3y agoFor those with the patience, I'd guess that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavetable_synthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavetable_synthesis would come closest to that ... with the 'right' controllers... and maybe more than one performer!
- andoando 3y agoPitch is the frequency of the oscillation, timbre is the internal structure of what's oscillating. Is that right at all?
- hydrogen7800 3y ago"Everything is overtones", or so I've heard somewhere. The pitch, or note you hear from an instrument is the fundamental frequency, and the combination of overtones determines the timbre. These overtones are other sine waves at different amplitudes and frequencies, and the combination of these are instrument dependent. Additive synthesizers do this to approximate "real" instruments.
- taco_emoji 3y agoIt's also the shape of the wave. Sawtooth waves are buzzier or "brighter" than sine waves, for example.
- andoando 3y agoAnd the shape of the wave is just a composition of more waves :->
- hydrogen7800 3y agoThis is a great visualization of fourier series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r18Gi8lSkfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r18Gi8lSkfM
- andoando 3y agoMan I wish my full time job was studying math.
- analog31 3y agoFor periodic signals the waveform and the overtone series precisely determine one another.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoI've gotten a lot of use out of thinking of genre in relation to timbre. Not as the only relevant thing, but part of a constellation. In most genres you have a palette of timbres to work with for each instrument based on the genre conventions. You can push at the edges or add things in, but have to balance audience expectations carefully as you do it. So for example the way an electric bass sounds in contemporary metal is just not normally going to "fit" into a chicago blues band, even though both are heavily dependent on the sound of electric bass. Different genres have different relationships to this constraint, for example western classical has a huge palette available in an orchestra but is relatively averse to using instrumentation outside of that collection. Except in percussion, where there is a lot more flexibility! Jazz has a fairly small & rigid set of acceptable timbres for its core instruments, but is fairly tolerant of experimenting with new instrumentation. So then the two genre-timbre relationships I find most interesting are electronic and pop. Pop is, more than any other genre I think, curious about how timbre effects emotional response in music. An album by the same artist could have a huge range of different sounds for recognizable instruments, using the tension between them for different effects. And then large swaths electronic music are built largely around active change of timbre over time through a piece. Something you see used conservatively and carefully in most genres becomes almost the central practice. IDK it's hard to articulate and I'm not trying to set a reductionist framework about how music sounds or anything. Just a line of musical thought I've been exposed to and found valuable.
- tetha 3y agoWell there is Dimmu Borgir, with an orchestra and a choir: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El4zsUZjsDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El4zsUZjsDc - and it is just nuts. Yes that's 90 minutes, but watch 5 and then decide. And that's why I love folk-ish metal so much. Why shouldn't we have a lead/harmony violin on top of a metal rhythm section? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F17sxgZdXZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F17sxgZdXZw Or a hurdy gurdy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT7HqIP55tI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT7HqIP55tI Or a pipa, which was btw very hilarious in poland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwpKZtPBIEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwpKZtPBIEQ I'm honestly thinking of dropping some money to get myself an A-tuned drone flute[0]. Drone flutes sound really cool, and the drone would be tuned to just about the highest two notes on the guitar... and if you work with it a bit, drums/bass/rhythm guitars helping with rhythms, chords and harmony could really push that somewhere really interesting. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OlNNEuu88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OlNNEuu88
- hnthrowaway6543 3y ago> Another way to think about timbre is by comparing instruments. In an old stand-up bit, Steve Martin strummed the banjo and mused, “You just can’t sing a depressing song when you’re playing the banjo . . . You can’t just go, ‘Oh, death, and grief, and sorrow, and murder.’ Anyone who's played Outer Wilds should disagree with this.[0] To say we can't describe timbre is a bit misleading, because there are concrete mathematical ways to analyze sounds; they exist in a three-dimensional space of frequency, amplitude and time. But that's helpful in the same way that describing programming languages as collections of 1s and 0s is. What's lacking for describing timbre, I suppose, are the steps between "this sound is a sum of a particular arrangement of sine waves" and "this sound is a piano". There are common terms such as ADSR or "brightness" and "warmth" but those don't tell the full story. The question is, how valuable is that intermediate step when you could just say "this is a piano, this is a banjo"? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR_wIb_n4ZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR_wIb_n4ZU
- tomjakubowski 3y agoI always thought the Outer Wilds OST was rather hopeful, in a rustic kind of way, not depressing.
- shagie 3y agoI'd also recommend Timber Zeal - https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceBanjoMusic https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceBanjoMusic https://timbrzeal.bandcamp.com/music https://timbrzeal.bandcamp.com/music ... and the Hardspace Shipbreaker opening https://youtu.be/b4LbAr4uz9A https://youtu.be/b4LbAr4uz9A You certainly can do minor with a banjo.
- wordsinaline 3y agoI've always thought of Jimi Hendrix as an example of timbre used for revolutionary purpose. A lot of what he acheived he acheived with timbre.
- midiguy 3y agoHe definitely opened the door for timbral exploration on the guitar using electronics.
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- logrot 3y agoTimbre can vary a lot day by day on the same instrument. Violin and the bow are both made of wood and a rainy damp day can easily sound different than dry summer's day. You can get good carbon fiber bows and they are much less weather sensitive. You can also get carbon fiber violins but I haven't heard one that sounds as good as one made from wood.
- elihu 3y ago> "Timbre’s role in music has always been underrated, or even ignored, probably because it is an intangible that’s difficult to describe, hard to categorize, and so far, immune to measurement. " In the mid-to-late 1800s, Herman Helmholtz was building spectrographs of musical sounds by listening to them through a bunch of resonators of varying sizes that acted as band-pass filters, and recording how loud each harmonic sounded. His writings are still relevant today. https://www.amazon.com/Sensations-Tone-Dover-Books-Music/dp/0486607534 https://www.amazon.com/Sensations-Tone-Dover-Books-Music/dp/... I've heard that the Sethares book (which is much more recent) is really good too, but I don't have a copy of that one. https://www.amazon.com/Tuning-Timbre-Spectrum-William-Sethares/dp/1852337974 https://www.amazon.com/Tuning-Timbre-Spectrum-William-Sethar...
- peterlk 3y agoThe quoted section of the article is pretty out of touch with modern music. Many (most?) genres of EDM place the importance of timbre and texture above harmony and melody
- caseyohara 3y agoThat was mentioned in the article. > Timbre is even more crucial in contemporary genres such as electronic dance music and rap. EDM, said Swoger-Ruston, is really “experimentation with timbre.” The widespread use of sampling means the sample, not the note, is increasingly the basic unit of music.
- elihu 3y agoI think where the article is out-of-touch is implying that timbre is still largely a mystery, when actually, for the most part, it isn't.
- mp05 3y agoYeah, well frankly most EDM fucking sucks and that's pretty much why. Your average cool guy "producer" doesn't know the first thing about intervals, counterpoint, or even basics like triads or major/minor scales. But they sure can twist knobs in a way that makes neat sounds!
- alana314 3y agoWe can get closer to the mathematical definition of timbre by talking about the strength of the harmonics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRAXK4QKJ1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRAXK4QKJ1Q
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]
- deltasepsilon 3y agoThis story was not submitted by tintinnabula. I'm scandalized. /s
- Barneyhill 3y agoI went to a interesting hackathon the other day focused on building tools for exploring timbre in sound https://comma.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/timbre-tools-hackathon/ https://comma.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/timbre-tools-hackathon/. Was brilliant, a lot of groups focusing on the use of ML to characterise the "unexplainable" in sound synthesis. We ended up submitting a tool for interacting directly with Ableton using LLM agents after becoming disenchanted with text2audio models, wrote about it here - https://montyanderson.net/writing/synthesis https://montyanderson.net/writing/synthesis
- butterchaos 3y agoVery cool. I will have to join "mod wiggler" lol. I have been out of it so long muff wiggler is now mod wiggler. Come on, that is absurd. Muff Wiggler was the best name ever.
- jrajav 3y agoYeah.... no. Why audio-nerd forums were ever so infantile as to brand themselves with "muff" and "slutz" isn't much of a big mystery, but we haven't lost anything of value by seeing those 'cute' names off. I'd like to chat about synthesizers with fellow nerds without feeling rightfully embarrassed about the name in the header.
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoThose cutesy names were also a barrier to getting girls and young women involved in this stuff too. Changing it to modwiggler was absolutely the right thing to do.
- muxator 3y agoThe way a sound evolves in time contains a lot of timbrical information. Different harmonics have different ADSR curves (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release). Above all, one cannot overstress the importance of the attack transient. There are famous experiments in psychoacoustics that show that, when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of two different instruments may become hard to tell apart. Personal anecdote: as a classic guitarist, it took me three years of experimentation to find the right way to cut my fingernails in order to have a better sound. The Electronic Engineer in me says that those were three years spent to look for how to improve 0.1 seconds of noise at the start of each of my notes.
- schwartzworld 3y ago> when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of two different instruments may become hard to tell apart A neat trick is playing guitar through a volume pedal. You mute the sound, pluck a string and then swell in the volume pedal. The rest of the ASDR envelope can be created with other effects like delays.
- CPLX 3y agoThe song Cathedral by Van Halen is a particularly brilliant example of this. Except even more remarkable he used the knob on the guitar to do it rather than a pedal: https://youtu.be/3OqrWUooOJc?si=NJDoNGkSfJu0gM6X https://youtu.be/3OqrWUooOJc?si=NJDoNGkSfJu0gM6X
- cromniomancer 3y agoAnd reportedly killed the volume pot on the second and final take: "Eddie did two takes, and the volume knob froze completely at the end of the second take due to the heat generated from rolling it on and off." https://www.vhnd.com/diver-down/cathedral/ https://www.vhnd.com/diver-down/cathedral/ His signature Peavy Wolfgang guitars later featured low-friction pots that are still available for sale as individual components https://www.vanhalenstore.com/page/VH/GG/EVHPOT https://www.vanhalenstore.com/page/VH/GG/EVHPOT
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- superb-owl 3y agoHighly recommend the book “Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale” for engineers interested in music theory https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html
- tech_ken 3y ago> A vocal timbre can also reveal economic and cultural background. Some singers...were encouraged to either accentuate their timbre...or to abandon what occurred naturally for them Vocal timbre is a big identifier of different rap subgenres and artists, seems like. Certainly seems like much of the vocal delivery on a track explores fluctuation of the timbre, even when the pitch is constant or has little dynamics. It's interesting to think how the timbral effects of a regional accent would interact with the beat construction/development. Is the trap hi-hat a result of the Southern drawl?
- midiguy 3y agoThe reason I hate heavy autotune in recent hip-hop is because it destroys all of the interesting timbre that could be there, and reduces it all the same annoying voice
- tech_ken 3y agoDepends on the usage for me; I think the point of the article was that timbre isn't something that's orderable, there's lots of different timbres and processed vocals are their own thing. Sometimes their texture fits really well into the palette of the song, IM personal O. Thinking of like "Lollipop"
- crowcroft 3y agoTone is in the fingers, as they say for guitarists. Different woods, magnets, strings all impact tone for sure, but at the end of the day Jimmy Page sounds like Jimmy Page and Hendrix sounds like Hendrix cause tone is in the fingers. That’s what stops music from being math.
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- JALTU 3y agoAt least this article will reinforce the concept, and the correct spelling, if not any appreciation for the quality!
- joebergeron 3y agoThis is tangential to much of what this article discusses, but I've had this idea kicking around in my head for a while, that, to some degree, the artificial imitation of acoustic instruments using synthesizers is to music what skeuomorphism is to design, and I (generally) dislike it for all the same reasons. This isn't to diss synthesizers on the whole - I unequivocally love them, and they really opened up my musical world by a wide margin. Nor am I saying that there is no place for synth patches that attempt to "sound like" "real" instruments (for lack of a better word; I consider every "model" of synthesizer to be its own very real and distinct instrument). Skeuomorphic design, to me, largely feels lazy and unattractive; rather than designing for the new, maybe unfamiliar, medium you're working in, you attempt some facsimile which inevitably cannot live up to the original, either out of lack of ambition, or lack of faith in your audience to understand or appreciate without the anchor of a common metaphor. It lacks idiomaticity - there are particular details, quirks, associated with different mediums that lend themselves to different sorts of designs, and a skeuomorphic design language ignores these. (The same is true of musical instruments. A piece written for the lute, say, played on piano, would feel very different than a piece written for piano, played on piano; what is easy, or possible, on one instrument, is not necessarily as sonorous on another.) To me, the use of synthesizers to emulate acoustic instruments, where the express intent of the composer/producer/whatever is to evoke the sound of that acoustic original (read: where the creator would prefer the sound of the real instrument), is, at its most generous, telling of a lack of creativity and at worst laziness. (If what you want is expressly the sound of a synthetic imitation for the purposes of your art, none of this applies.) It is a lack of creativity in the case where the creator simply does not have access to "real" instruments they'd rather use, and it's laziness where you have access and ability but opt for something you yourself deem inferior. Of course, this all presupposes that there is something lost when say, a synthesizer plays a violin patch in an earnest effort by the creator to emulate a violin - where a real violin is actually what's desired. I think this isn't controversial to say, but of course it's a spectrum; I have much less of a problem in cases where the delta is smaller; e.g., simple legato harmonies from a string section can be emulated more convincingly (by orders of magnitude) than some virtuosic cadenza by a solo instrumentalist.
- pushedx 3y agoThe lead developer of Melodyne, Peter Neubäcker, has one of the most precise and concrete understandings of timbre. He used that knowledge to create software which changes pitch without changing speed or timbre. There's a neat documentary floating around which includes some scenes where he explains how he increased his understanding of waveforms in the frequency domain by physcially modeling them in the time domain.
- snvzz 3y agoTangentially, Sennheiser HD600 headphones are known as "timbre kings" for their ability to reproduce timbre accurately.
- Aidevah 3y agoA fine article on the role of timbre which is indeed discussed little compared to the focus on harmony and form for classical music. Charles Rosen gave one possible reason for this neglect in his book "Piano Notes", where he traces it to a philosophical prejudice of composers from Hadyn onwards against variety in tone colour and in favour of more abstract qualities. > The utility of the piano for composing was its neutral and uniform tone color: in theory (although not in reality) the tone quality of the bass is the same as the treble. In any case, the change in tone color over the whole range of the piano is, or should be, gradual and continuous (there are breaks, of course, when the notes go from one string in the bass to two and then to three in the treble). The monochrome piano might be used therefore just for its arrangements of pitches, and the quality of the sound could-absurdly in many cases-be considered secondary. > What made it possible for composers to refuse to acknowledge the difference on the piano between treble and bass and leave whatever problems arose to be solved by the performer was the fact that the change in tone color over the span of the keyboard is not like the leap from a bassoon to a flute but continuous and very gradual when the instrument is properly voiced. These imperceptible gradations are the result of a deliberate policy of a unified sonority on the part of musicians and instrument makers. All attempts over the history of piano construction to incorporate anything analogous to the picturesque changes of registration in the organ and the harpsichord had little success, were not exploited by composers, and were finally abandoned. Radical contrasts of tone color were traded for the possibility of making a gradual crescendo or diminuendo. This was a decision that took place at the same time as the preeminence accorded to the string quartet over all other forms of chamber music; that, too, emphasized the importance of a unified tone color. Chamber music with wind instruments, while the occasion for several masterpieces, became the exception, an exotic form. That is why the use of colorful sonorities in the orchestra has so often been considered somewhat vulgar, as if calling attention to the sound were paradoxically to detract from the music. The prestige given to pure string sonority is part of the asceticism of nineteenth-century high culture. Contrasts of tone color were given a significantly lower place in the hierarchy of musical elements. This is one reason that only the piano repertory rivals the string quartet as the most respectable medium for private and semiprivate music-making from Haydn to Brahms.
- dtagames 3y agoSynth players have studied and emulated timbres (and created new ones) since the pipe organ (an additive synthesizer). Many books have been written about timbre in electronic terms -- a combination of frequencies and amplitude envelopes that either sound to our ears like classical instruments, or like something else entirely. I would go so far as to say understanding and selection of timbre is 50% of the work of a synth player.
- Illiana_adam 3y agoEverything we can't describe in music" is a thought-provoking statement that highlights the limitations and strengths of music as a medium.