> 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?
It depends on what synth you're using, and how you're controlling it. Most synthesizers and controllers are profoundly lacking in expressive control, and of course a synthesizer that just plays back a recorded sample of a real piano isn't going to sound as good as being in a room with the real thing. Just because the mainstream synthesizer world has been sort of stuck in a rut for 40 years doesn't mean this is the be…
A real piano is also profoundly lacking in expressive control over timbre (excluding extended techniques like half-pedaling or directly touching the strings that hardly ever show up in the repertoire). The only control the piano gives you over note timbre is how hard you press the key. Once you've done that, the hammer disconnects from the key and flies through the air out of your control. A keyboard with polyphonic…
> The only control the piano gives you over note timbre is how hard you press the key.
This is just not true at all. The action of a piano is a very sophisticated mechanism that conveys both acceleration and velocity, along with the initial position of the key (e.g. fully released or half-pressed). This allows for a huge amount of tonal variation, though it's more subtle than a ribbon controller, and obviously a synth can do many things than a piano cannot.
Tone 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.
Tone 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.
I 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/ . 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 abou…
Very 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.
Yeah.... 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.
The 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 anecdot…
A real piano is also profoundly lacking in expressive control over timbre (excluding extended techniques like half-pedaling or directly touching the strings that hardly ever show up in the repertoire). The only control the piano gives you over note timbre is how hard you press the key. Once you've done that, the hammer disconnects from the key and flies through the air out of your control. A keyboard with polyphonic…
> The only control the piano gives you over note timbre is how hard you press the key. This is just not true at all. The action of a piano is a very sophisticated mechanism that conveys both acceleration and velocity, along with the initial position of the key (e.g. fully released or half-pressed). This allows for a huge amount of tonal variation, though it's more subtle than a ribbon controller, and obviously a synt…
The piano action physically disconnects the hammer from the key after you press it. Here's a diagram:
All the complexity you mention only affects how the repetition lever (part 9) briefly bumps against the hammer shank (part 8). The only information this imparts to the hammer is velocity, and once it happens there's no more contact until the hammer falls back down. The hammer can't somehow remember what caused it to travel at a specific velocity and strike the string differently. There's only a single degree of freedom in its movement. What you perceive as "a huge amount of tonal variation" is mostly note timing.
> 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'…
The 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
My use of illusion was not intended to diminish the significance of music. To the contrary, I meant to distinguish it as an exceptional perceptual phenomenon which reveals important aspects of the inner workings of human experience. Somehow, the physical situations of our bodies become perceptual experiences. Usually, those perceptions are mere descriptions of the physical world, for physically navigating it. Some ex…
This is something I've been thinking about the last 3-4 years and desperately what I am trying to do. I have what I think some interesting ideas and implementations, but no one quite grasps my thought process and I am stuck between believing Im onto something and that I am furiously chasing nothing.
My experience in pursuing this is that I applied to about a dozen on-campus CS grad programs, over the course of two years, noting this research direction, but those applications were all rejected. You would think with the emergence of generative AI that there could be some interest. I suspect the application was of interest, but that universities have a shortage of experts in generative AI, and that a multidisciplinary project like this might be misunderstood within a CS department or would have to be accepted by a very specific advisor who may not exist. The best chance might be to convince investors to help assemble the right team and to provide a viable R&D budget.
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