Timbral Thievery

Abstract

<p>Timbre often indexes an instrument’s materiality, and timbral variation often correlates with a player’s actions. Yet synthesizers complicate phenomenological links between sound and source. This chapter juxtaposes three instruments: an electromagnetic tuning-fork apparatus, developed by the nineteenth-century scientist Hermann von Helmholtz; the RCA Mark II, used by Milton Babbitt and other mid-twentieth-century composers; and the Yamaha GX-1, a large polyphonic synthesizer from the 1970s, played by Stevie Wonder and Keith Emerson. These synthesizers create new timbres and also imitate acoustic instruments, in a process that Robert Moog calls “timbral thievery.” Such imitations can provoke exaggerated or anxious discussions of synthetic and natural timbre. At the same time, performers may showcase the gap between timbre and instrument, exploiting a sense of uncanny or ambiguous sound sources for varied expressive ends. Ultimately, then, synthesizers help musicians both produce and conceptualize timbre.</p>

Robert Johnson and spectral timbre: what we hear, what we construct

“…Moreover, Fales argues that a ‘paradox emerges with the observation that while timbre is a dimension of central importance to identifying sources, it is also the dimension that is most divergent from the sound in the physical world’ (Fales 2002, p. 58). Or, as Jonathan De Souza glosses the paradox in relation to synthesisers, ‘timbre is linked both to source identification and its breakdown’ (De Souza 2018, p. 21). Timbre is a result of our processing of sounds and exists ‘only in the mind of the listener’ (Fales 2002, p. 62) 11 .…”

“… 17 In this context, live performance parallels later recording techniques; see De Souza (2018, p. 15) on ‘undesirable noise’ eliminated in the synthesiser aesthetic and Chion (2016, p. 63) on the ‘culture of listening’ that enables listeners familiar with a particular musical tradition to ‘not hear’ certain noises emanating from performances on acoustic guitar.…”