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.
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