Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everything we can't describe in music

hazlitt.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 117 posts

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#11

Post by giraffe_lady »

I'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.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#12

Post by hnthrowaway6543 »

> 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

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#13

Post by hydrogen7800 »

andoando wrote: post #9

Pitch is the frequency of the oscillation, timbre is the internal structure of what's oscillating. Is that right at all?

"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.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#14

Post by andoando »

odyssey7 wrote: post #4

Arnold 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.…

I 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.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#15

Post by ta2112 »

taco_emoji wrote: post #2

"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.

As 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.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#16

Post by ta2112 »

andoando wrote: post #9

Pitch is the frequency of the oscillation, timbre is the internal structure of what's oscillating. Is that right at all?

Yes, that sounds mostly right to my understanding. Exploring the space of that internal structure is the point of the article. Both pitch and timbre get remarkably complicated the more they're looked in to.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#17

Post by odyssey7 »

andoando wrote: post #14
odyssey7 wrote: post #4

Arnold 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.…

I 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…

What you illustrate is deeply fascinating. In music, there is a grammatical perception that works both cognitively and as an embodied experience.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#18

Post by tomjakubowski »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #12

> 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 math…

I always thought the Outer Wilds OST was rather hopeful, in a rustic kind of way, not depressing.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#19

Post by shagie »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #12

> 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 math…

I'd also recommend Timber Zeal - https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceBanjoMusic https://timbrzeal.bandcamp.com/music ... and the Hardspace Shipbreaker opening https://youtu.be/b4LbAr4uz9A

You certainly can do minor with a banjo.

Re: Everything we can't describe in music

#20

Post by taco_emoji »

hydrogen7800 wrote: post #13
andoando wrote: post #9

Pitch is the frequency of the oscillation, timbre is the internal structure of what's oscillating. Is that right at all?

"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.

It's also the shape of the wave. Sawtooth waves are buzzier or "brighter" than sine waves, for example.
Post reply on HN