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Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge explores how timbre shapes musical affect and meaning. Integrating perspectives from musicology with the cognitive sciences, author Zachary Wallmark advances a novel model of timbre interpretation that takes into account the bodily, sensorimotor dynamics of sound production and perception. The contribution of timbre to musical experience is clearest in drastic situations where meaning is itself contested; that is, in polarizing contexts of reception where evaluation of'musical'timbre by some listeners collides headlong against a competing claim-that it is just'noise.'Taking this ubiquitous moment as a starting point, the book explores affect, reception, and timbre semantics through diverse cultural-historical case studies that frustrate the acoustic and perceptual boundary between musical sound and noise. Nothing but Noise includes chapters on the racial and gender politics in the reception of free jazz saxophone'screaming'in the late 1960s; an analysis of contested timbral ideals in the performance practices of the Japanese shakuhachi flute; and an historical examination of the overlooked role of'brutal'timbres in the moral panic over heavy metal in the eighties and nineties. The book closes with a discussion of the slippery social fault lines separating perceptions of musical sound from noise and the ethical stakes of encountering another's'aural face.'

Timbre is among the most important and the most elusive aspects of music. Visceral and immediate in its sonic properties, yet also considered sublime and ineffable, timbre finds itself caught up in metaphors: tone “color”, “wet” acoustics, or in Schoenberg's words, “the illusory stuff of our dreams.” This multi-disciplinary approach to timbre assesses the acoustic, corporeal, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of tone color in Western music practice and philosophy. It develops a new theorization of timbre and its crucial role in the epistemology of musical materialism through a vital materialist aesthetics in which conventional binaries and dualisms are superseded by a vibrant continuum. As the aesthetic and epistemological questions foregrounded by timbre are not restricted to isolated periods in music history or individual genres, but have pervaded Western musical aesthetics since early Modernity, the book discusses musical examples taken from both “classical” and “popular” music. These range, in “classical” music, from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the belcanto opera and electronic music to saturated music; and, in “popular” music, from indie through soul and ballad to dark industrial.

From Music to Sound is an examination of the six musical histories whose convergence produces the emergence of sound, offering a plural, original history of new music and showing how music had begun a change of paradigm, moving from a culture centred on the note to a culture of sound. Each chapter follows a chronological progression and is illustrated with numerous musical examples. The chapters are composed of six parallel histories: timbre, which became a central category for musical composition; noise and the exploration of its musical potential; listening, the awareness of which opens to the generality of sound; deeper and deeper immersion in sound; the substitution of composing the sound for composing with sounds; and space, which is progressively viewed as composable.The book proposes a global overview, one of the first of its kind, since its ambition is to systematically delimit the emergence of sound. Both well-known and lesser-known works and composers are analysed in detail; from Debussy to contemporary music in the early twenty-first century; from rock to electronica; from the sound objects of the earliest musique concrète to current electroacoustic music; from the Poème électronique of Le Corbusier-Varèse-Xenakis to the most recent inter-arts attempts.Covering theory, analysis and aesthetics, From Music to Sound will be of great interest to scholars, professionals and students of Music, Musicology, Sound Studies and Sonic Arts.Supporting musical examples can be accessed via the online Routledge Music Research Portal.

Roughly defined as any property other than pitch, duration, and loudness that allows two sounds to be distinguished, timbre is a foundational aspect of hearing. The remarkable ability of humans to recognize sound sources and events (e.g., glass breaking, a friend's voice, a tone from a piano) stems primarily from a capacity to perceive and process differences in the timbre of sounds. Timbre raises many important issues in psychology and the cognitive sciences, musical acoustics, speech processing, medical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Current research on timbre perception unfolds along three main fronts: On the one hand, researchers explore the principal perceptual processes that orchestrate timbre processing, such as the structure of its perceptual representation, sound categorization and recognition, memory for timbre, and its ability to elicit rich semantic associations, as well as the underlying neural mechanisms. On the other hand, timbre is studied as part of specificscenarios, including the perception of the human voice, as a structuring force in music, as perceived with cochlear implants, and through its role in affecting sound quality and sound design. Finally, computational acoustic models are sought through prediction of psychophysical data, physiologically inspired representations, and audio analysis-synthesis techniques. Along these three scientific fronts, significant breakthroughs have been achieved during the last decade. This volume will be the first book dedicated to a comprehensive and authoritative presentation of timbre perception and cognition research and the acoustic modeling of timbre. The volume will serve as a natural complement to the SHAR volumes on the basic auditory parameters of Pitch edited by Plack, Oxenham, Popper, and Fay, and Loudness by Florentine, Popper, and Fay. Moreover, through the integration of complementary scientific methods ranging from signal processing to brain imaging, the book has the potential to leverage new interdisciplinary synergies in hearing science. For these reasons, the volume will be exceptionally valuable to various subfields of hearing science, including cognitive auditory neuroscience, psychoacoustics, music perception and cognition, but may even exert significant influence on fields such as musical acoustics, music information retrieval, and acoustic signal processing.It is expected that the volume will have broad appeal to psychologists, neuroscientists, and acousticians involved in research on auditory perception and cognition. Specifically, this book will have a strong impact on hearing researchers with interest in timbre and will serve as the key publication and up-to-date reference on timbre for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, as well as established scholars.

Průkopnická publikace v rámci české hudebněpedagogické literatury vyvádí témbrový sluch z područí sluchu pro řeč a pevně jej zasazuje do komplexu hudebně sluchových schopností. Představuje starší i současné metody testování témbrového sluchu a detailně seznamuje čtenáře s výsledky testování témbrového a fonematického sluchu předškolních dětí. Toto centrální téma doplňují informace z dalších oblastí: sluchová pozornost, její stimulace a uplatnění, případová studie dítěte s výrazným hudebním nadáním a specifickou poruchou učení. Syntéza poznatků a zkušeností s testováním témbrového sluchu se uplatňuje v návrzích testů témbrového sluchu pro tři věkové skupiny v rozmezí 5–15 let. Knihu uzavírají kapitoly věnované možnostem rozvoje témbrového sluchu v kolektivních i individuálních hudebních činnostech v mateřských, základních a základních uměleckých školách.

Despite its importance as a central feature of musical sounds, timbre has rarely stood in the limelight. First defined in the eighteenth century, denigrated during the nineteenth, the concept of timbre came into its own during the twentieth century and its fascination with synthesizers and electronic music-or so the story goes. But in fact, timbre cuts across all the boundaries that make up musical thought-combining scientific and artistic approaches to music, material and philosophical aspects, and historical and theoretical perspectives. Timbre challenges us to fundamentally reorganize the way we think about music. The twenty-five essays that make up this collection offer a variety of engagements with music from the perspective of timbre. The boundaries are set as broad as possible: from ancient Homeric sounds to contemporary sound installations, from birdsong to cochlear implants, from Tuvan overtone singing to the tv show The Voice, from violin mutes to Moog synthesizers. What unifies the essays across this vast diversity is the material starting point of the sounding object. This focus on the listening experience is radical departure from the musical work that has traditionally dominated musical discourse since its academic inception in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Timbre remains a slippery concept that has continuously demanded more, be it more precise vocabulary, a more systematic theory, or more rigorous analysis. Rooted in the psychology of listening, timbre consistently resists pinning complete down. This collection of essays provides an invitation for further engagement with the range of fascinating questions that timbre opens up.

The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music assembles a broad spectrum of contemporary perspectives on how'sound'functions in an equally wide array of popular music. Ranging from the twang of country banjoes and the sheen of hip-hop strings to the crunch of amplified guitars and the thump of subwoofers on the dance floor, this volume bridges the gap between timbre, our name for the purely acoustic characteristics of sound waves, and tone, an emergent musical construct that straddles the borderline between the perceptual and the political. Essays engage with the entire history of popular music as recorded sound, from the 1930s to the present day, under four large categories.'Genre'asks how sonic signatures define musical identities and publics;'Voice'considers the most naturalized musical instrument, the human voice, as racial and gendered signifier, as property or likeness, and as raw material for algorithmic perfection through software;'Instrument'tells stories of the way some iconic pop music machines-guitars, strings, synthesizers-got (or lost) their distinctive sounds;'Production'then puts it all together, asking structural questions about what happens in a recording studio, what is produced (sonic cartoons? rockist authenticity? empty space?) and what it all might mean.

The Contemporary Guitar traces the extraordinary rise of the instrument in concert music over the past century. Though recognized worldwide as a popular music icon, the all-to-recent time when the guitar was looked down upon as a second-class citizen in the world of “serious” music is finally past, and it can now be found in the scores of the most important composers. The guitar's rightful place in chamber music, orchestral music, or as a solo instrument is now without question, whether in the classic acoustic form or the more recent electric version.While the guitar has stood in the vanguard of musical experimentation, its many new techniques and notations remain a mystery for many composers and players. In The Contemporary Guitar, musician and scholar, John Schneider explains each class of technique and illustrates them with examples. Moreover, because the guitar is easily refretted, it has also become a leading instrument in the exploration of the relatively new musical language of microtonality. In this revised and enlarged edition from the original work of three decades ago, Schneider adds a broad-ranging, entirely new chapter on the instruments, notation and repertoire with insights into the interpretation of historical works through the application of accurate contemporary tunings and temperaments.The guitar's unique timbre—its tone color—is one of the most versatile among modern instruments, both acoustic and electric. Most players who intuitively explore the subtleties of tone color will find outlined in The Contemporary Guitar the specific principles of physics that determine these subtleties which, once mastered, permit guitarists to control more completely the expressive palette of their instrument. Designated the Rational Method of Tone Production by its author, Schneider defines in great detail the timbral characteristics of acoustic and electric instruments from theoretical, physical, and musical viewpoints. Players in search of new repertoire will find an historical survey of the literature, an exhaustive list of new music, and a multitude of techniques for bringing such music to life. The Contemporary Guitar provides audio examples online for those seeking to discover new sounds and includes the notation to perform them.

'Great tone'is a combination of many things--electronic, acoustic, musical, physical, emotional, and cerebral. Each player assembles and manipulates those components into a special blend, creating his own unique sonic stew. So how do we get great tone? The answer for most of us is a lifetime of pursuit that is at once equal parts joyous and frustrating, but always rewarding. A big part of succeeding in that pursuit is having an understanding of what goes into making great tone. That's where this book comes in. GUITAR TONE: PURSUING THE ULTIMATE GUITAR SOUND is the ultimate resource for guitarists searching for not just the'best'tone, but also their own individual sound. This book explores all the gear and examines the approaches famous players take to achieve their distinctive tones. You'll look at vintage and new, boutique and mainstream, modern and retro. Along the way, Guitar Tone attempts to sort out the facts versus the myths versus the opinions and explores how each component contributes to the overall tone of our guitars and other gear. The search for tone may not come to a definitive conclusion for most of us, but that doesn't make the journey any less worth taking. It's not easy to achieve great tone, but the reward--the joy of wallowing in the luscious sound of strings resonating in concert with your musical desires--is a reward greater than any other. Better tone awaits!

Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale focuses on perceptions ofconsonance and dissonance, and how these are dependent on timbre. This alsorelates to musical scale: certain timbres sound more consonant in some scalesthan others. Sensory consonance and the ability to measure it have importantimplications for the design of audio devices and for musical theory andanalysis. Applications include methods of adapting sounds for arbitrary scales,ways to specify scales for nonharmonic sounds, and techniques of soundmanipulation based on maximizing (or minimizing) consonance. Specialconsideration is given here to a new method of adaptive tuning that canautomatically adjust the tuning of a piece based its timbral character so as tominimize dissonance. Audio examples illustrating the ideas presented areprovided for free on the Springer Extras website (http://extras.springer.com). Thisunique analysis of sound and scale will be of interest to physicists andengineers working in acoustics, as well as tomusicians and psychologists