To begin our seminar, we will read sources that were trailblazing in the relatively new field of timbre research: Hermann von Helmholtz, Cornelia Fales, and Stephen McAdams. Each one of these authors brings something quite different to timbre research: Helmholtz is a 19th-c. physician who was able to discuss, for the first time, the physiology of timbre perception; McAdams is a currently-working cognition scientist specializing in timbre; Wallmark is one of McAdams’s collaborators who has a musicology background and often bridges science and musicology; Cornelia Fales is an ethnomusicologist; I am a music theorist.
Table of Contents
Jan 23: Hermann von Helmholtz and physiology
Helmholtz was one of the very first people to delve into the relationship between acoustics, timbre, and physiology. The entire book can be found online for free, but we will read a secondary source instead from the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory: .
Please read this prior to our first class so that we can get off to a running start.
We will also be discussing options for what topics will be included in the class.
Jan 30: Stephen McAdams and perception
Don’t forget to email me with your three favorite readings to lead discussion on! Click here to complete.
Stephen McAdams runs a music cognition lab at McGill university and has produce a huge volume of research on timbre and psychology. His work provides important modern updates to the theories put forth by Helmholtz long before such studies were possible.
I’ve picked as one of our readings reading because it’s meant as an introduction to the accomplishments and limitations of psychological research on timbre. However, it was published ten years ago, and so further work has now been done beyond what this reading covers. represents some of this more recent work. It focuses specifically on orchestration.
Due Monday at noon
In class, you were assigned to a partner. Within each pair, one partner should read and the other should read .
Write a one page outline that summarizes your reading. Be sure to include the main thesis of the paper and definitions of any key terms. Add page numbers for any quotations you pull.
Due Wednesday at noon
Work with your partner to create a short statement on how your readings interact with one another, roughly 100 words in length.
Submit all work by posting a thread on Blackboard! You may email me partner responses directly.
Feb 6: Cornelia Fales and ethnomusicology
While I think it’s important to know about the scientific side of timbre research, as a musician, I find myself more interested in the cultural side. is an especially significant work because it represented a counterpoint to the trend that developed through the 1980s and 1990s to view timbre as a wholly acoustic and scientific phenomenon. Fales decisively demonstrates that cultural background has great impact on the perception of timbre.
Due Monday at noon
Write a response essay (NB: NOT a summary!) to this essay, at least 500 words long.
A response essay is your personal take on the readings, and thus you shouldn’t be trying to write the “right answer,” but rather your opinion and reaction to what you’ve read.
Here is an optional prompt for your essay: Fales’s article was important at the time it was published because of its challenge to the utility of scientific approaches to timbre analysis. Having read two more scientific approaches in the previous weeks, what do you make of this scientific vs. cultural-analytical divide in timbre analysis? You may wish to muse on the advantages and disadvantages of each side, challenge this divide entirely, or compare it to other disciplines in which you’ve seen such a divide.
Feel free to write your response on another idea, if you wish.
Due Wednesday at noon
Read your partner’s response essay, and write a meaningful response to their thoughts, roughly 100 words in length.
Submit all work by posting a thread on Blackboard! For your partner responses, leave a comment on their thread.
Feb 13: Lavengood and spectrogram analysis
I will not be able to attend class today for discussion. This means there will be no meeting today. In lieu of that, I’m giving you some analysis work and a short reading. There will be no partner responses this week.
Sonic Visualiser setup
In my dissertation, the spectrograms are generated with a program called RX4. Unfortunately this is an expensive program, so you shouldn’t purchase it! Instead, we will all be learning to use Sonic Visualiser (myself included) to do some spectrogram analysis.
Here’s a step-by-step setup:
- Install Sonic Visualiser, available here.
- Import the recording of Grisey’s “Prologue” from Les Espaces Acoustiques (available in the readings folder; violist: Anna Spina) into Sonic Visualiser.
- The default pane that opens is a waveform. To open a spectrogram, press G (or go to Pane > Add Spectrogram). You can close out of the waveform if you like by clicking on the x in the top left of that pane.
- Change the following settings in the right-hand sidebar that appears with the spectrogram: move the knob on the right of “scale” all the way to the left/down; set window to 8192, 50%, and 2x; bins to all bins, log.
- Zoom in using the vertical scroll wheel to about halfway. If you hover over the scroll wheel, you should see a popup that says “Vertical zoom: 11025Hz”. (It’s ok if you don’t have these exact values.
- Make sure you are using the Navigate tool (hand icon), and drag your spectrogram so that the lowest frequency in your window is about 20–90Hz. 20Hz is the lower limit of human hearing, and 123Hz is the lowest note in this piece (B3—the viola uses scordatura tuning, as indicated in the score, which is in the readings folder also).
- Your spectrogram should now look basically like this annotated screenshot.
Before asking me more questions, I suggest digging around in Sonic Visualiser’s documentation to see if you can find the answer yourself—I actually do not usually use this program and will probably look it up myself if you ask me a question! This is the link to the section on spectrograms: https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/doc/reference/3.2.1/en/#spectrogram
Reading
Read Chapter 1: Methodology in . This is where I discuss my approach to visually analyzing spectrograms.
Analysis
Do your best to apply these terms to the spectrogram you have of Grisey’s “Prologue,” using Sonic Visualiser. (Again, I suggest you familiarize yourself with all of SV’s functionality by referencing their documentation.)
In some word procesisng software, write up a 750-word analytical essay in which you apply at least 3 of the binary oppositions to this piece of music. Ideally, you will be able to not just state “true” things about the spectrogram, but also add on some type of interpretive layer—though this is not a requirement. Do not feel that you need to account for the entire piece. Listen to the whole piece, and find something that is interesting to you.
Use File > Export Image File… to capture relevant pictures of the spectrogram that support your argument, and enter them directly into your essay in the appropriate places.
Submission (by Wednesday, end of day)
Save your essay as a PDF, and upload it on Blackboard. Go to “Assignment Submission” in the sidebar and upload it by clicking “Spectrogram Analysis.”
Feb 20: No meeting
I will be out of town this day, and I’m giving you a week off.
Bibliography
If articles are not available online, you should find them in the Readings folder.