Tim's guide to Timbre

This is a brief exploration of timbre, which I think is so important to ecological criticism. You can find a little more in the first chapter of Ecology without Nature and in an essay I wrote for the online journal Literature Compass, called “Of Matter and Meter.”

Think of Yves Klein's paintings of pure color, such as IKB. Color is always suspended in a medium. In Yves Klein's case, it's a very precious, unusual medium that lets the lapis lazuli base of ultramarine blue shine forth with unusual luster.

Now think of a sound. We never hear sounds as such: we only ever hear sounds as mediated through a material of some kind or other. Heidegger puts it beautifully when he says that we never hear the wind in itself, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees. We never hear B flat as such, only B flat through a trumpet, B flat through a violin. The material out of which the instrument is made generates the timbre of the note.

This is also true of the voice. Vowels are a way of adding different timbres to breath. An /o/ sound requires a certain tension of the throat and windpipe, while an /a/ sound requires another kind of tension.

When you hear a violin note, you are hearing the cat gut or wire out of which the strings are made; the horsehair bow modulated by the wood on which the horsehair is strung; the wooden body of the violin, curved and of a certain thickness and quality of wood, and so on. Timbre is the materiality of sound. And what a materiality.

You only hear certain aspects of that materiality. Because we have ears and an auditory system of a certain range, we do not hear wood as a bat might hear the same wood, when it sends out a high-pitched sound that bounces off its surface. So in a sense when we hear a timbre we are also hearing our nervous system's way of processing that particular sound—there is no sound as such.

Bridget Riley's paintings work directly upon your optic nerves. Well—all paintings do; but Riley's work puts this work into the foreground. You can think of sound art as the sonic version of Riley's paintings.

This week I played La Monte Young's Drift Study 31 1 69, which is basically two superimposed tones. I was surprised to find that the sound changed as I moved around the room—sometimes it was a clear single tone, sometimes it varied in pitch.

Notes are made up of layer upon layer of harmonics. The particular timbre of a sound is the harmonic signature of the material out of which it's made: which harmonics are amplified, which ones repressed, and so forth. The breathy, scratchy sound of a bowed violin string contrasts with the open ting of a vibraphone. This is because the metal in the vibraphone and the materials of the violin allow certain harmonics to be heard. So when you hear a sound, you are hearing a sensory material manifold consisting of the matter through which the sound emanates, modulated by the ears and auditory equipment of the brain-mind.

If you like, scent also has a kind of timbre. That's why you can talk about woody or spicy notes in a perfume. You are literally inhaling and smelling the volatile particles circulated by a certain material. So timbre is the perfume of sound. That's why it's so primal and intimate. Timbre affects our bodies just as they are. There's no way of avoiding the cringe your nervous system does when you hear fingers going down a blackboard. It just happens.

Some contemporary artists make music out of timbre (principally or alone), just as some artists have made visual art out of color. Composers such as La Monte Young have produced music that attunes us to particular timbres. One way of doing this is through just intonation. Most modern instruments fudge the way they produce sound, so that most sounds are okay most of the time, but none are spectacular—all are relatively muddy, that is, they have a limited harmonic range.

The visual equivalent would be dull browns rather than Yves Klein's brilliant blue. Perhaps the most egregious example is the equally-tempered piano. Because the piano is the reference instrument for so many other ones—including, for example, most synthesized instrument sound—piano tuning has a pervasive effect on what we think musical sound is. Piano notes are fudged to make the instrument even across a range of tones and scales, but the notes are ever so slightly out of tune with each other, as they are tuned to fractional harmonics rather than ones with whole-number values.

When you tune a piano or any other instrument with whole-number values, you create an instrument with a much narrower functionality (you can't play everything on it without some things sounding weird), but extreme depth and beauty (and, if you like, astonishing dissonance).

Or you can write drone music that consists of notes held for an extremely long time, to allow the listener to get a feel for the timbre of the instrument playing the note. This is common in Indian music, which developed many wonderful instruments that emphasized harmonic depths and heights, such as the tambura.

Or you can put sounds in actually existing spaces and have listeners walk around the spaces (such as La Monte Young's Dream Houses), so that the environment as such becomes one of the instruments that modulates the sound (as it always does in any case), thus making you aware that your position and movement relative to the sonic source is also part of the music.

You can (and La Monte Young does) combine all these things, of course, and produce something really compelling and powerful. Something that allows the listener profound insight into the nature of matter, the receptive properties of her or his body and mind, and the resonant qualities of the environment in which an instrument is played. All these phenomena are bound up in the notion of timbre.

Timbre, quite simply, is the material environment as such emerging as aesthetic experience. Ecological art, then, must necessarily have to do with timbre.

One problem with our “materialistic” society is that it's not nearly materialist enough. The short, rigid time frames in which capitalism compels us to live, and the drifting, aimless consumerism it enjoins us to perform, don't allow for anything like a deep appreciation of matter. Certain religious contemplative traditions such as those found in Buddhism hold open a space for a far more engaged materialism than is currently permitted in contemporary society. And certain forms of art walk us through the insights that contemplative traditions enable us to gain into the nature of matter and the qualities of our bodies and minds. These insights are earned through serious investments of time (if not money).

One important insight is that there's no sound as such, there's no matter as such. At bottom sound and matter are differential, relative phenomena. Matter is vivid and empty, real yet illusory. In fact, our sense of its realness is in direct proportion to our sense of its illusoriness.

The more of a hardcore materialist you become, the more you open up your mind.