timbre, sampling and visuals

Musical timbre was arguably one of the most developed features during the last century. The study of musical timbre has led to a new understanding of human perception.
On a recent study, Bailes (2006) has studied the role of timbre in musical imagery. In the pilot experiment, music students had to do timbre discrimination tasks by hearing a melody in which each note was played by a different set of sampled orchestral instruments. However, nine of the respondents later said that the use of sampled sounds was a disadvantage for them in order to answer correctly. As Bailes states, "the recognition and identification of the stimulus sounds were particularly important for three participants who explained that they would tend to visualise an instrument or instrumentalist when imaging a timbre".
This suggests that the use of sampled sounds can tend to vanish the image of someone or something being played. This is particularly interesting, as the use of samples is a very popular technique among musicians nowadays. It may be possible that some musical styles which use samples frequently produce to listeners the feeling that the artist and/or the instrument is absent. Therefore, some people consider that visual external stimuli, such as the use of lights and video performances may serve as a perceptual substitute.
Sampling somehow exists since 1948, when composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer performed his works on tape manipulation.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Schaeffer
Bailes, Freya: "Timbre as an Elusive Component of Imagery for Music", 2006.

musical timbre as an adaptive feature? Timbre and image building.

1.Why is musical timbre so well developed? Is it an evolutionary adaptation? Following David Huron's work, are we able to say that timbre recognition development could be an advantage for humans? Maybe it is possible to build a timbre history. What we today call timbre recognition was arguably one of the most important safety measures that primitive humans had during the night. Timbre perception was highly developed in order to recognize potencially dangerous animals that they could not see in the dark. Humans were actually able to imitate these dangerous sounds with their pitch and timbral scales. Sound imitation was used to communicate which timbres should people be aware of.
Probably the first musical instruments that were studied by humans were animals. Humans may have needed to organize the timbral, rhythmical and pitch related features of dangerous animals. Grunts, growls and steps were analyzed in order to build a functional image of the animal that could let them decide whether to escape or fight against the animal.
Now we are able to go back again to Huron's work on music and social bond theory. It is also possible to study the interaction between mother and child during development, where music and movement are heavily related. Temporal arts could be the result of these development. In my opinion, art could have been useless itself, but an unconscious preparation for survival may have been developed.
It may be useful to make a blend between musical studies and psychoacoustic studies in order to study these topics in detail.

Music as change, technology, interactive music, emotions, timbre

Music is somehow a crisis. Music is change. That would please John Cage. Music is fluctuating between body and soul, between physical, physiological and perceptual ways of perceiving what is going on. Music lies in a mysterious surface, just between pitch and frequency. I'm giving an example. There are so many aspects of music that you can never say everything about it. The Master in Music, Mind and Technology that I would love to join will help me to organize my ideas so that I will be able to say a few things more.
What can technology give to music? What can music teach to a technological life? For example, Anthony Prechtl is developing interactive music that could just fit in video games. He's also thinking about the relationship between music and emotions. Can we learn something more about those emotional peaks that music give to us? How can technology help us?
My area of interest, as I wrote it several times, is timbre. Timbral scales and timbral spaces. There's something really exciting going on there.

Why is music such an incredible placebo?

Argentinean music psychologists say that there is a connection between music and our earliest experiences. In this sense, music and our primary feelings are strongly related. Isn't this weird? I mean that nobody thinks about a mother and his baby while listening to Wagner. But I'm sure that our musical structure is developed during this time.

New timbres

I expect to hear new timbres in the future. We must thank lots of people because of their 20th century creations -Harry Partch, Léon Theremin, Robert Moog, and so on-, but I think this is not over. There are lots of new timbres left. In our musical canvas there are many colours that are missing.

What is music saying to music?

There is a sort of communication between several states of music. Music is always linking itself, establishing bonds between past, present and future of music.
But wait, because when I say music I'm not exactly using a shared concept.
My idea is that music is not only what's happening around there, but it is also the relationship between the listener and the "that". "That" can be lots of things: a performer, an album, a random situation with some kind of musical character, etc. It's always better to avoid closing this complex term. Music is a word that must be opened in order to be studied. Opening words means linking them a lot with new terms and ideas.
This amplification of music is what gives birth to interesting ideas such as the spectral communication -Schifres & Martinez- that is being held between musical actors during our musical life. I agree with the idea that music hosts a communication in time. Time is a strange key in music and it should be studied properly.

Imaginación y metáfora en la audición musical / I.-C. Martínez

Para la teoría de la estructura subyacente la jerarquía de tensiones entre eventos evoluciona en el interior de la obra de acuerdo al derrotero que sigue la progresión tonal. En la superficie, cada evento obtiene su función como resultado de sus conexiones con los eventos inmediatamente circundantes en la cadena de sucesiones; el recorrido entre líneas de eventos sucesivos genera ángulos de desvio de la tensión general de la pieza que contornean la línea del movimiento principal de la composición. Al mismo tiempo, la continuidad del flujo musical se manifiesta en una cualidad general del movimiento que sintetiza las relaciones de tensión y distensión acontecidas en la sucesión de eventos. Así, el flujo se encauza en un patrón estructural profundo que regula la tensión general y establece fuertes vínculos entre puntos que si bien distan temporalmente, resultan próximos en la altura tonal, generando en la profundidad una continuidad lineal cuyas metas estructurales se resuelven en el largo plazo."

Choosing one pitch out of a discrete series using the same timbre and using several timbres at the same time

I thought about a possible experience. For example, if I hear a cluster going from C3 to, let's say, B3, and I need to repeat just one of the notes that I'm hearing, which note will I choose? Will the answer change in children? Is it possible to see what happens in musical talents? Is there any pattern of answers or not? What about when you use just 7 notes instead of 12? What about changing the temperament from, let's equal temperament to just intonation? Will the results change if I change the timbre I'm using (i.e., human voice instead of piano)?
What made me think about this experience? I've read that a pitch is often inferred from non-harmonic spectra, supposedly through a mapping process, an attempt to find the closest harmonic fit. If we organize sounds in such a way that we need to harmonize things that are not harmonic and give them just one pitch -and just one timbre too-, how do we organize in pitch a growing and discret series of pitches? Finally, what would the results be if we use more than one instrument in the same experience? For example, an alto tenor plays a C3, a basoon a C3#, a violin a D3, a piano a D#3, and so on. I hear this rich combination of timbres and pitches and I need to answer by singing which pitch do I hear the most, and maybe I could answer which instrument does this pitch belong to. This experience, if well done and controlled, could provide us very interesting results.

Musical achievement, practice, expression and timbre.

I'm reading Sloboda's big book. I would like to jump a bit and talk about the relationship between practice and musical achievement. Let's start with three things that were discovered through the Leverhulm study:
1) Early parental involvement is very important in musical achievement. If you are a children and your parents talk with your music professor and if they really want to hear what can you do today with your instrument, you'll probably have more motivation to practice.
2) Self-motivation to practice is really important as adolescence progresses. Now it's time to work because you love music, not because your parents want you to do it.
3) External circumstances are really important. Studying in summer will not be as much as enlightening as studying before giving a concert.

Now let's say a word about our subject. Timbre microstructure is one of the elements that will be affected by the expressive devices a high-level performer will use to add value to a musical score. What about high-level composers and producers?

Timbre, emotional response, nature and technology: cooking new musical sounds

Spectral analysis is a very important tool in order to smoothly discover new timbres that aren't real or natural. How will the "image" of this timbres mutate? What do we get when we reach the end of the road, where we need to build an image of those timbres that haven't got any defined image? What kind of visual guide do we need as a basis to support these new timbres that haven't got an image?
When we listen to an album at home, let's say orchestral music, there will be instruments that suddenly will come to our minds, and also music players and conductors. We listen to a piano and we imagine a piano -sometimes we even imagine that we are playing that piano-. But how about those who didn't saw a piano in their lives? Here we got lots of things to research on. For example, what kind of instrument does a child imagine when he hear an instrument that he never saw? Do they actually hear as they link what they're listening to with "instrumental images"?
What was the impression that Debussy had at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1899 when he could get in touch with a brand new timbre - the javanese gamelan?

"Debussy said about gamelan music, 'If one listens to it without being prejudiced by one's European ears, one will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a traveling circus.' " (Hugh, 1998)

What comes into our mind when we hear music commonly described as ambient? Maybe just a person in front of a laptop? Maybe an animated situation with abstract or concrete elements? In which way is the video performance artist or "VJ" relevant in this kind of associations between music and visuals?
Before the sound was recorded, did we always saw what we were listening to? In which situations did we not? What happened in certain operas, churches and synagoges, where choir was hidden on purpose? And what about those instruments that were hidden in order to provoke some strange effect?
Are there any definite universal images for timbres? Is there one or more timbres associated with the same "real" instrument?
What do you imagine when you hear timbres that are similar to real timbres -midi cellos, electronic percusions, but also instruments whose sounds are linked by fading using an attachment technique that can link their most "human-relevant" partials together-? What do you imagine when you hear timbres that are not that related wih those that we can call conventional timbres?
There is a bird that imitates sounds. The lyre bird adjusts its timbre in order to sound like other birds and other things going on in the environment. What can we study with the help of this "timbre chamaleon" in order to get new conclusions in this subject?

what does timbre perception/recognition means emotionally to us?

How can we associate a musical act with an image? A few years before, I heard the sound of a cello and I could imagine a cello. I was even forced to see it because it was there. But this situation changed drastically. Now it's not easy to determine what is made in the computer and what is not. How is it possible to make today a link between a determinated timbre and a "cognitive image"? Musical perception and visual perception work usually together. People tend to associate faces and voice inflections.
I should say that today the sinthesized sound is an important emotional vehicle in pop music. What emotional value is expressed in those fake cellos that are used in cumbia and reggaetón music? We could take a step further and ask ourselves: what is the relationship between the fonological and the semiotical aspects of musical language? What does timbre means and what emotions does it deliver in relationship with the image of it?

an emotional approach

The subject I'm trying to study is related with music and emotion. What do you feel like when you listening to music but you can't tell which instrument is playing because it simply doesn't exists?
It couldn't just be a combination between two instruments that you feel that you could recognize separately. What I'm talking about is when you feel that you can't reach a visual image about what you're hearing. It's like a "Señor Coconut effect". The listener doesn't know if there's a big orchestra playing and some guys over there shouting "Mambo!" or if it's nothing more than just a guy in front of the computer. How many instruments do you hear in this recording? How many players? What kind of instruments are they?
The most astonishing subject is that people like Uwe Schmidt make albums like "El baile alemán", where the computer does everything with the help of just a few samples, but when you here Señor Coconut playing live you see a computer but lots of musicians with their "classic instruments" too. That's as disturbing as a Farinelli. It gets confusing and maybe most of the listeners will tend to think that the album is made with "real" instruments too. What's a real instrument today?
Maybe a computer playing "real timbres" is less confusing than a two real instruments playing a unisone and creating a new timbre?
Anyway, my thesis is that synthesized sounds can be music expression vehicles. Today we can hear more and more timbres and we see all kind of strange things even in contemporary popular music. For example, an electric guitar can play as if it was a piano (King Crimson). Musicians and music producers play and express theirselves in a genuine emotionally way by using artificially sinthesized timbres. It's not about two or more instruments playing a unisone and creating a new timbre, but about developing new timbres in musical acts. The result is that music is less "seen" than yesterday.
The history has lots of things to say to us about this. I'm interested in an experimental approach and i would like to write about what different artists do and why do they do it like that. I'm also interested in the "castratti" voices, in some church choirs that play are hidden so that you can't see them in churches, synagoges and operas and in Mahler's sixth symphony, where a bell is being played from outside the scenario so that you can't see where it comes from.
What can we say about recorded music in this investigation? We record music since XXth century. This makes possible to reproduce always a same version. Recording and playing distort the sounds, giving us new musical experiences. Some of them are the vinyl sound, the scratched cd sound and the bad quality mp3 sound. All of them are used today as musical tools for making new music. Not only Uwe Schmidt, but also some of the 80's music, most of the recent film and tv soundtracks and pop music is made using midi orchestras or keyboards that emulate a "real sound". Virtual timbres have helped to some musical styles developement, such as the casiotone MT-40 in 1985, who give birth to the "digital reggae". The latinamerican cumbia and reggaetón styles need some use of the synthed percussion, bass, brass and strings in order to reach a particular sound.
Adorno said that art is not the same now that we live in a technical reproductibility era. I would like to add that according to music, some time ago the timbre could be seen, but nowadays it's not that easy.
There is a sound in my head that hasn't got any image nor face.
Which methods should I use to demonstrate this ideas?