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?
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