Timbre Realities

Abstract

This chapter addresses the concept of timbre in reference to “Anthropogenic Debris,” the first movement of Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018). It develops an enactive approach to timbre, demonstrating the reality of timbre as lived sonic experience. The chapter shows how timbral changes over time play a central role in music’s formal design. Further, the chapter entails a phenomenological investigation of timbre experience as the basis for its analysis of Lim’s music. The chapter argues that from the perspective of enactive cognition, timbres are real, qualitative phenomena co-determined by the sensorimotor activity of a perceiving creature and the physical attributes of sound waves in a specific sonic environment at a particular time.