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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"Information wants to be free." -Stewart Brand
hi hans-christoph,
well, maybe you should place some sounds online and let people discuss their characteristics and talk about them... and then compare statements about quality, properties, adjectives. describing just theoretically a non existing sound is not so easy.
otoh some people in earlier days (pierre schaeffer?) already tried to categorize sounds. this is a life-time work.
m.
----- 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
"Information wants to be free." -Stewart Brand
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
"Information wants to be free." -Stewart Brand
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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"Information wants to be free." -Stewart Brand
________________________________________________________________________ ____
Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them, or perish. -William Carlos Williams
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).
Hi, to my experience this very much depends on the genre where electronic music is used. In fields of dance or club music the latter notions might well be used, but i never heard this in contemporary "serious" or improvised music.
best greetings, Thomas
On Thursday, Apr 22, 2004, at 11:47 America/New_York, Thomas Grill wrote:
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).
Hi, to my experience this very much depends on the genre where electronic music is used. In fields of dance or club music the latter notions might well be used, but i never heard this in contemporary "serious" or improvised music.
I am interested in composers who discuss timbre, whether they are "serious" or not. I am especially interested in the words used by composers who are as distant from a Western Classical musical education as possible. Most composers of "serious" music probably come out of the Western Classical tradition, being trained listening to the instrumentation of that tradition, so such composers would be educated in that timbre space, and to use and be familiar with those words in relation to that timbre space.
Club/Dance music composers are very likely to be quite removed from the Western Classical education, therefore would be a good contrast. So far "crunchy", "grainy", and "phat" are the most common, and the only word in common with Western Classical words I have gotten has been "bright" from one person. But again, this is very informal, just to get an idea of what's out there.
.hc
here are some i use all the time:
sticky crunchy wet phat dark
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
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
"Information wants to be free." -Stewart Brand