Thoughts on Fantasy Timbres

In answering an E-mail message from a long-time xenharmonic explorer
friend, I launched into a dissertation of recent observations about timbre.
Perhaps you too would be interested in it.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------

Here's something to think about when it comes to finding what you
described as making "free use of sound synthesis techniques of any kind,
coming as close to voice or instrumental sound as suits the music I'm
producing". Implicitly I perceive you to be suggesting "or NOT coming
close to any particular instrumental or vocal sound".

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that the idea of sounds that are
natural and expressive, and yet don't sound like any existing musical
instrument (or voice), may not be possible to achieve! I would never have
believed that ... five years ago or so. The reason why I'm starting to
draw that surprising conclusion comes from an ever-closer examination of
musical instrument sounds.

In examining instrumental timbres in careful detail, I've come to
realize that I'm looking at them in too much detail!

What seems more clearly meaningful to their essential nature, is not the
specific things that set a clarinet, say, apart from a flute, as much as
the fact that their ranges of timbral qualities overlap quite a bit with
one another.

Most of the woodwinds really do sound quite similar to each other in
their upper ranges, at least as far as overtone structure is concerned.
Sure, they are distinguishible; don't get me wrong, but they're not
massively different. And that's largely true of brasses (at any one volume
level anyway). And on top of that, there's even a lot of overlap between
the timbral qualities across the major families.

Professional arrangers often describe saxophones as chameleons; you put
them among woodwinds and they sound like woodwinds; put them among brasses
and they sound somewhat like brasses, put them among strings and they sound
somewhat like strings. But there's a lot of truth to that in other
instruments as well. Horns, for example, have long been used in woodwind
ensembles, as have double basses. And 'celli are often likened to sounding
a lot like a tenor or bass human voice.

I've become aware of that further as I've taken up the soprano saxophone
the past few months. I'm amazed by how much difference in timbre can come
from seemingly small adjustments in my mouth configuration (embouchure).
And that's just one single instrument, with one single player. I've also
become aware of that as I've recorded various instrumental performers for
use in sampling. I have to ask them to even out all of those expressive
mechanisms so that I can produce a clean loop, and then resupply those
expressions synthetically - synthetically so that I can control them
musically rather than having them play back as a tape recording would.
It's very easy to see that it's very difficult to resupply them
synthetically.

The idea that there exists a vast spectrum of timbres that existing
musical instruments carve tiny pieces of, I'm beginning to believe is just
not true. It's much more accurate to suggest that each instrument actually
carves a very wide sath through those possibilities, and covers a LOT of
the available possibilities. In fact it's looking like it goes even one
step further than that - to the point where the swaths existing instruments
carve through the timbral spectrum are in fact so wide, that not only do
the cover the majority of the spectrum, but they are so wide that they
overlap each other!

What seems to distinguish one instrument from another seems to be not
nearly as much their unique timbral qualities DISTINCT from other
instruments, as the way they behave within a field of timbral qualities IN
COMMON with other instruments.

So what this all seems to be demonstrating, is that there is so much
timbral overlap between the familiar instruments, that almost any seemingly
all-new timbre you devise is more likely to be perceived as "like" some
other existing instrument, or some qualities of an existing instrument at
least, than to be perceived as something truly new.

The solution? Well, perhaps it lies in Wendy Carlos' approach of - in a
sense anyway - using fire to fight fire: Building hybrid timbres - timbres
that take advantage of this overlapping space, so that they sound like two
instruments at the same time - "it's just like a violin," we say, "but then
again, it's also just like a clarinet too".

Another possibility is that, to make a new invented timbre sound like
something in its own right, perhaps it's just a matter of using it a lot.
That way, whatever qualities you give it, even though at first most of them
will remind your audience of their overlap with some other instrument
they're familiar with, that particular combination of attributes will,
given enough time, start sound like something meaningful in a coherent
sense of a single, all-new instrument.

Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl
with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 9 Mar 1997 13:17 +0100
Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA10135; Sun, 9 Mar 1997 13:17:09 +0100
Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA10163
Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI)
id EAA23861; Sun, 9 Mar 1997 04:14:22 -0800
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 04:14:22 -0800
Message-Id: <335ca7ef.761221085@kcbbs.gen.nz>
Errors-To: madole@mills.edu
Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu
Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu