The Semantics of Timbre

Saitis, Charalampos; Weinzierl, Stefan

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-14832-4_5

Cited by 22 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 74 publications

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“…Consequently, timbre-based music is designed to reflect the state of a unique individual rather than that of a group. Timbre (Saitis and Weinzierl, 2019) and sonority (McAdams, 2019) have been inherently connected to the display of emotions-even within the Western classical music tradition (Maddox, 2009). 18 JH duets occur either during dating or in joined entertainment between two female friends.…”

Section: Transmission and Participation In Performance Of Timbre-basementioning

confidence: 99%

The Overlooked Tradition of “Personal Music” and Its Place in the Evolution of Music

Nikolsky¹,

Alekseyev²,

Alekseev

et al. 2020

Front. Psychol.

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This is an attempt to describe and explain so-called timbre-based music as a special system of musicking, communication, and psychological and social usage, which along with its corresponding beliefs constitutes a viable alternative to "frequency-based" music. Unfortunately, the current scientific research into music has been skewed almost entirely in favor of the frequency-based music prevalent in the West. Subsequently, whenever samples of timbre-based music attract the attention of Western researchers, these are usually interpreted as "defective" implementations of frequency-based music. The presence of discrete pitch is often regarded as the structural criterion that distinguishes music from non-music. We would like to present evidence to the contrary-in support of the existence of indigenous music systems based on the discretization and patterning of aspects of timbre, rather than pitch. This evidence comes mainly from extensive ethnographic research systematically conducted in eastern European and Asian parts of Russia from the 1890s. It involved the efforts of thousands of specialists and was coordinated by dozens of research institutions, and it has included not just ethnomusicology but linguistics, philology, organology, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and religious, and social studies. Much of the data has not been translated into Western languages. Although some Soviet-era publications were tainted by Marxist ideology, many researchers strove to provide accurate information (despite at times having been prosecuted for their work), and post-1990 research undertook a substantial revision of ideologically compromised concepts. Timbre-based tonal organization (TO) differs from that based on frequency in its personal orientation: musicking here occurs primarily for oneself and/or for close relatives/friends. Collective music-making is rare and exceptional. The foundation of timbre-based music seems to have vocal roots and rests on "personal song"-a system of personal identification through individualized patterns of rhythm, timbre, and pitch contour, utilized like a "human voice"-whose sound enables

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Section: Transmission and Participation In Performance Of Timbre-basementioning

confidence: 99%

The Overlooked Tradition of “Personal Music” and Its Place in the Evolution of Music

Nikolsky¹,

Alekseyev²,

Alekseev

et al. 2020

Front. Psychol.

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“…Research in timbre semantics has long aimed to identify the few salient semantic substrates of linguistic descriptions of timbral impressions that can yield consistent and differentiating responses to different timbres, along with their acoustical correlates (see [2] for a comprehensive review). In the most commonly adopted approach, timbre is considered as a set of verbally defined perceptual attributes that represent the dimensions of a semantic space, derived through factor analysis of ratings along verbal scales known as semantic differentials [3].…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Timbre semantics through the lens of crossmodal correspondences: A new way of asking old questions

Saitis

Weinzierl

Kriegstein

et al. 2020

Acoust. Sci. & Tech.

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“…The auditory attribute of brightness is among the most studied aspects of timbre perception, and arguably among the most important perceptual attributes actively shaped by music performers, composers, and audio engineers. It systematically emerges as a major dimension across different types of sounds and analytical approaches towards the study of timbre dissimilarity (McAdams, 2019) and timbre semantics (Saitis and Weinzierl, 2019). The word "bright" was shown to be in the top five most frequently mentioned attributes of instrumental timbre across 11 orchestration texts (Wallmark, 2019) and in the top three most commonly used descriptions of sound effects processing among audio production professionals (Pearce et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, using synthetic tones with formant-like characteristics, Siedenburg (2018) demonstrated consistent shifts of perceived brightness between tones with highly similar SC values. In timbre semantics, sounds that are described as thick, dense, or rich are also described as less bright or brilliant, indicating an interplay between spectral energy distribution and spectral detail or richness (Saitis and Weinzierl, 2019). However incomplete the SC may be, it may still act as an effective summary descriptor for quantifying brightness perception (cf.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brightness perception for musical instrument sounds: Relation to timbre dissimilarity and source-cause categories

Saitis

Siedenburg

2020

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Timbre dissimilarity of orchestral sounds is well-known to be multidimensional, with attack time and spectral centroid representing its two most robust acoustical correlates. The centroid dimension is traditionally considered as reflecting timbral brightness. However, the question of whether multiple continuous acoustical and/or categorical cues influence brightness perception has not been addressed comprehensively. A triangulation approach was used to examine the dimensionality of timbral brightness, its robustness across different psychoacoustical contexts, and relation to perception of the sounds' source-cause. Listeners compared 14 acoustic instrument sounds in three distinct tasks that collected general dissimilarity, brightness dissimilarity, and direct multi-stimulus brightness ratings. Results confirmed that brightness is a robust unitary auditory dimension, with direct ratings recovering the centroid dimension of general dissimilarity. When a two-dimensional space of brightness dissimilarity was considered, its second dimension correlated with the attack-time dimension of general dissimilarity, which was interpreted as reflecting a potential infiltration of the latter into brightness dissimilarity. Dissimilarity data were further modeled using partial least-squares regression with audio descriptors as predictors. Adding predictors derived from instrument family and the type of resonator and excitation did not improve the model fit, indicating that brightness perception is underpinned primarily by acoustical rather than source-cause cues. V

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The Semantics of Timbre

Cited by 22 publications

References 74 publications

The Overlooked Tradition of “Personal Music” and Its Place in the Evolution of Music

The Overlooked Tradition of “Personal Music” and Its Place in the Evolution of Music

Timbre semantics through the lens of crossmodal correspondences: A new way of asking old questions

Brightness perception for musical instrument sounds: Relation to timbre dissimilarity and source-cause categories

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