I am not so much interested in sound morphology or mapping words to certain timbres. I am currently looking into how the perception how timbre has changed since the seminal papers on timbre perception were written in the 70's (Wessel 1978, Grey and Gordon 1978, etc.). In particular, since those researcher used only timbres from the Western Classical tradition, I think its likely that their research represents a narrow segment of the population.
Just as the bulk of the evidence says that no tuning system is innate to humans, but instead a product of acculturation, I think that some aspects of timbre perception are also a product of acculturation. When that research was done, basically no one grew up hearing synthesized tones from early childhood. These days, that is not only entirely possible, but quite likely. And there are probably even some who have been immersed in computer and electronic music since they were a child.
So as an indicator of this, I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of words people use a lot when they are talking about timbre. The main words I hear from the Classical tradition are "brightness", "warmth", "breathiness", "bite". I think that the only one of these words that I hear from electronic musicians is "warmth", but not that much. Words like "crunchy", "fat" ("phat"), "thick" are more common there, in my experience. To me this points to a different perception of timbre (but is not evidence enough to prove it).
.hc
On Thursday, Apr 22, 2004, at 04:27 America/New_York, Thomas Grill wrote:
Hi Hans-Christoph, just two important researchers in the field of sound-morphology:
Pierre Schaeffer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Schaeffer "Solfege de l'objet Sonore" (french) - http://www.ubu.com/sound/sch.html theories (french) - http://www.olats.org/pionniers/pp/schaeffer/theorieSchaeffer.shtml
Denis Smalley - http://www.city.ac.uk/music/denis1.htm
best greetings, Thomas
----- Original Message ----- From: "Hans-Christoph Steiner" hans@eds.org To: pd-ot@iem.at Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 9:43 PM Subject: [PD-ot] how would you describe how something sounds?
This kind of an informal poll. I want to find out what words electronic musicians use to describe how a particular sample sounds. In particular, I am interested in words used to describe the quality or timbre of the sounds rather than the loudness, pitch, rhythm, harmony, etc. Words that describe how a certain mix sounds would also be interesting.
There are particular words that are used by classical musicians and I want to compare these to words used by electronic musicians.
.hc
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