[HN Gopher] Everything We Can't Describe in Music
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Everything We Can't Describe in Music
        
       Author : anarbadalov
       Score  : 84 points
       Date   : 2024-04-16 19:02 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (hazlitt.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (hazlitt.net)
        
       | taco_emoji wrote:
       | "Terroir" is a terrible way to metaphorize timbre. The only
       | similarity is that they're both hard to describe. Terroir is
       | there before the wine is made and can't really be controlled by
       | the winemaker (except insofar as they choose where to plant or
       | what grapes to blend). Timbre is absolutely under the control of
       | the musician.
        
         | pimlottc wrote:
         | I think the sense is more they're both about hundreds of unique
         | physical characteristics, some of which are perhaps
         | unquantifiable.
         | 
         | The shape of an instrument, the material used, the type of
         | strings, their tension, the temperature and humidity in the
         | room. The way each player holds it, the size of their hands,
         | the specific strength of their fingers. Some of these factors
         | stay constant, others change from day to day or player to
         | player. The sum of all of these together creates a specific
         | timbre.
        
         | btown wrote:
         | > Terroir is there before the wine is made and can't really be
         | controlled by the winemaker (except insofar as they choose
         | where to plant or what grapes to blend).
         | 
         | I've met winemakers who think of planting in terms of
         | multigenerational experiments with highly intentional controls
         | for different aspects of soil and micro-climate that may vary
         | on a scale of a single meter, who work to find and train their
         | successors because they will not see the results of some of
         | these experiments in their lifetimes; winemakers who absolutely
         | understand that blending is not just a linear combination of
         | the characteristics of blended wines, but a truly complicated
         | system where certain flavors may heighten others; winemakers
         | who rely on centuries of experience in how funguses and other
         | microorganisms can be used in safe and flavor-enhancing ways.
         | 
         | Winemaking is engineering, just as musical instrument design is
         | (both physical and digital), and just as building a startup is.
         | The presence of human subjectivity as an evaluating oracle in a
         | complex system does not imply that its creators work without
         | intention or without rigorous systems-level thinking.
        
         | ta2112 wrote:
         | As a string player, terroir strikes me as a beautifully
         | appropriate way to describe timbre. My instrument was
         | constructed in the 19th century, probably in Germany. The
         | luthier, their choice of wood, the shape, the workmanship, the
         | strings, the bow, the weather, the player, the room, the mood,
         | the other players all affect the sound. A large portion of the
         | job of an instrumentalist is choosing which tools to use. There
         | are always compromises, and many variables that effect the
         | timbre simply are before a note is played, and have to be
         | worked with.
        
         | artimaeis wrote:
         | I think this is just another point of frustration with trying
         | to define timbre. There's definitely some points directly under
         | control: attack and brightness come to mind. Then there's some
         | that are less directly under control: the room and the
         | instrument itself.
         | 
         | It's no accident that musicians spend a lot of money on
         | instruments -- even electric guitar players -- an instrument
         | that is electronically amplified and often distorted and
         | otherwise augmented -- will have strong feelings about the
         | particular type of guitar they use. Leaving shape-based
         | decisions out of it (and pickups), hollow bodies are going to
         | produce a different sound than solid. Different wood types will
         | produce different tonal characteristics.
         | 
         | So the things that are directly controlled are less like
         | terroir, more like choice of grape used maybe? While the make
         | of the instrument, the shape of the room a recording was made
         | in, these are much more like terroir I think.
         | 
         | But it's probably just not a great metaphor.
        
           | mrob wrote:
           | >Different wood types will produce different tonal
           | characteristics.
           | 
           | True for acoustic guitars, but for electric guitars this is
           | thoroughly debunked:
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
           | 
           | Previous HN discussion:
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36106674
        
       | tarentel wrote:
       | As a synth enthusiast I generally think of timbre in relation to
       | "real" instruments, brass, strings, piano, etc. In the article
       | they mention there are as many as 10 dimensions but don't
       | actually define what those are. Timbre is something I've thought
       | about a lot but nailing down a more general classification seems
       | pretty challenging.
        
         | wrs wrote:
         | That's funny, I'm more likely to describe "real" instrument
         | timbres in synth terms, many of which I bet relate closely to
         | the 10 dimensions. Oscillator waveform, envelopes, filter
         | shape/cutoff, resonance...
        
       | odyssey7 wrote:
       | Arnold Schoenberg observed the deep connection between music,
       | perception, and cognition; anticipated composers applying timbral
       | control as is now commonly done with synthesizers; and apparently
       | did not anticipate non-subtlety of the effect in EDM:
       | 
       | "I think the tone becomes perceptible by virtue of tone color
       | [timbre], of which one dimension is pitch. ... Pitch is nothing
       | else but tone color measured in one direction. Now, if it is
       | possible to create patterns out of tone colors that are
       | differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call 'melodies',
       | progressions, whose coherence evokes an effect analogous to
       | thought processes, then it must also be possible to make such
       | progressions out of the tone colors of the other dimension, out
       | of that which we call simply 'tone color', progressions whose
       | relations with one another work with a kind of logic entirely
       | equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of
       | pitches. That has the appearance of a futuristic fantasy and is
       | probably just that. But it is one which, I firmly believe, will
       | be realized.
       | 
       | ...
       | 
       | Tone-color melodies! How acute the senses that would be able to
       | perceive them! How high the development of spirit that could find
       | pleasure in such subtle things!"
       | 
       | -- Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 1911, toward the end of
       | chapter 22.
       | 
       | Personally, I anticipate that if humanlike AGI is achieved, then
       | it will understand the illusion of music. Not merely because
       | music understanding is an attribute of _humanlike_ , but because
       | there must be something intrinsic in the process of human
       | cognition that causes the illusion of music occur. Music
       | understanding could be viewed as an essential waypoint on the
       | path to AGI.
        
         | andoando wrote:
         | I had a simple thought a couple years ago that still fascinates
         | me. If you do something as simple as "clap clap clap" (with
         | equal measures of time), you can naturally relate it to any
         | other set of sounds with that simple pattern (ABABA). moreover,
         | there is a 1 to 1 relation of this abstraction in space, where
         | one can represent the sounds as marks on a screen (as I have
         | done here for example, as "clap clap clap, X X X, - - -, or
         | whatever).
         | 
         | Despite the different sensory systems (sound, or visual) and
         | the difference in actual data (I don't know how many photons or
         | audio waves entering your brain), we can abstract them down and
         | understand/relate them with a simple pattern.
        
           | odyssey7 wrote:
           | What you illustrate is deeply fascinating. In music, there is
           | a grammatical perception that works both cognitively and as
           | an embodied experience.
        
             | andoando wrote:
             | Yes, but its not just music. Our senses are very much
             | linked in that we can build a one to one relation of ideas
             | in visual space to auditory space and vice versa. There is
             | a common abstract model we understand so to speak.
             | 
             | Our model of perception is very finely tuned with that of
             | space-time.
        
         | sdwr wrote:
         | Pop music really does do this as he described. There are lots
         | of songs that play with expectations of timbre in the same way
         | that normal music plays with expectations of pitch.
         | 
         | When I get mentally crystallized, I hear music as proof-of-work
         | in the vein of Bitcoin hashes.
        
         | malloryerik wrote:
         | I very much appreciate your comment, and at the same time am
         | interested to challenge this idea of "the illusion of music".
         | What about music is an illusion? Maybe this was just an
         | unfortunate phrasing, and yet it might touch on the heart of
         | the matter. Music is a language of relationships, indeed it is
         | nothing but relationships, in time, pitch, timbre, volume,
         | voice, number and so on, non-symbolic and changing
         | relationships of sound carrying aesthetic and emotional feeling
         | and meaning. It is both objective and subjective -- objective
         | in the sense that "4 + 4 = 8" is an undeniably more beautiful
         | statement than "4 + 4 = 6", and subjective in the sense that
         | you and I may have different favorite numbers and also we may
         | react differently to various medications or prefer different
         | foods. Music is external and internal, social and individual.
         | What it is not ever is an illusion as then it would not exist.
         | (It may express illusion, or become more like a creator of
         | illusions, for example when the orchestra tries to conjure up
         | the illusion of a thunder storm.) Now, one might be tempted to
         | counter that the kind of "meaning" music carries is itself an
         | illusion, an epiphenomenon maybe, but then why should one care
         | about anything at all, including AGI, since the kind of meaning
         | that music carries is the same as the meaning of love, of hate,
         | of good and bad, pains and pleasures, and hopes and regrets,
         | tragedies and successes?
         | 
         | Maybe a reason for calling music an illusion is to try to point
         | out that it's all in our heads. Sure, the physical instruments
         | are over there, but they are just some atoms and molecules
         | rattling about creating vibrations that, like everything
         | ultimately, share the meaninglessness of the physical universe
         | of just more material stuff (ignoring the quantum and the
         | unknown). In which case though life seems also to look more
         | like an illusion. Ah but the meaningless vibrations enter our
         | ears and are processed and become music, so like color there is
         | none but in our heads, thus illusion? But these notions also
         | fall apart. The redness of apples isn't all in our heads; it
         | requires a certain relationship to light frequencies that we
         | see as redness. It's not an illusion it's just what red looks
         | like through a living human body. If not through our senses and
         | brain, and then mind, where should we experience it?
         | 
         | Music is only ever meaningless if it is unheard, as apples can
         | only not be red when they are unseen (or are Granny Smiths).
         | 
         | So music is only meaningless if there is nobody -- no body --
         | to listen. And maybe that's where all of this leads. Your AGI
         | needs to be embodied and alive.
        
           | odyssey7 wrote:
           | My use of _illusion_ was not intended to diminish the
           | significance of music. To the contrary, I meant to
           | distinguish it as an exceptional perceptual phenomenon which
           | reveals important aspects of the inner workings of human
           | experience.
           | 
           | Somehow, the physical situations of our bodies become
           | perceptual experiences. Usually, those perceptions are mere
           | descriptions of the physical world, for physically navigating
           | it. Some exceptions exist, such as music and optical
           | illusions. The translation from air pressure fluctuations to
           | a tree branch falling is one type of experience, the link to
           | love or hope is another. Rather than being insignificant, my
           | sense is that music understanding will prove to be an
           | emergent capability available in whatever architecture might
           | produce humanlike AGI, because it connects human perception
           | and cognition too thoroughly to not be baked-in. Going
           | further, building models to understand music would be an
           | excellent step toward embodied AI with humanlike cognition.
        
             | andoando wrote:
             | This is something I've been thinking about the last 3-4
             | years and desperately what I am trying to do.
             | 
             | I have what I think some interesting ideas and
             | implementations, but no one quite grasps my thought process
             | and I am stuck between believing Im onto something and that
             | I am furiously chasing nothing.
        
       | cainxinth wrote:
       | tldr: Timbre, the unique quality of a sound that distinguishes
       | different voices or instruments from one another, is complex to
       | define and measure and is often overlooked in music theory, which
       | tends to focus more on pitch, rhythm, and harmony.
        
       | navane wrote:
       | Timbre is what makes the violin sound different from the bassoon,
       | what makes the strings in general gives them their sound, and
       | brass theirs. Timbre is what makes a singers voice unique.
       | 
       | Classical composers had a set of fixed timbres to play with, each
       | instrument having their own. With synthesizers everything is
       | possible.
        
         | nicklecompte wrote:
         | "everything is possible" except for a synthesized instrument
         | that actually has the expressive range of a real violin or
         | saxophone. Even a synthesized piano is noticeably lifeless
         | compared to the real thing (synthesized piano bass notes are
         | especially thin).
        
           | relaxing wrote:
           | My trombone is lousy at reproducing the sound of a cello, but
           | I don't consider it inferior.
           | 
           | More to the point, the synthesizer has more options for
           | expressiveness through change in timbre, glissando,
           | microtones, etc.
        
             | kazinator wrote:
             | But nobody made the claim that everything is possible with
             | a trombone.
        
           | kazinator wrote:
           | Only the the best grand pianos have any bass. Your cheap 43"
           | tall console piano for apartment use will not have much bass
           | to speak off. The strings are too short, the box is too
           | small. We have to restrict ourselves to True Scotsman's
           | pianos.
           | 
           | Bass is easy to obtain out of a synthesizer: just make sure
           | you have a subwoofer in the speaker system. It doesn't have
           | to be a True Scotsman's synth or subwoofer.
        
           | scns wrote:
           | Well, you may be right. But there are musicians able to touch
           | me deeply with synthesizers:
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R8RaCLzGgE
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWgXVbI5ZRw
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjIzyeQrG7U
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEDhoRruflk
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJe1JKzcM8s
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0zRm5SjfQU
        
           | elihu wrote:
           | It depends on what synth you're using, and how you're
           | controlling it. Most synthesizers and controllers are
           | profoundly lacking in expressive control, and of course a
           | synthesizer that just plays back a recorded sample of a real
           | piano isn't going to sound as good as being in a room with
           | the real thing. Just because the mainstream synthesizer world
           | has been sort of stuck in a rut for 40 years doesn't mean
           | this is the best we can do.
           | 
           | There is, however, some real progress being made. For
           | controllers, check out the Linnstrument, the Osmose, the
           | Continuum. MPE was added to the MIDI spec a few years back,
           | which makes it a lot more feasible to sell expressive
           | instruments and have them "just work" with existing synths.
           | As for synthesizers, just about anything is possible.
           | Physical modelling is becoming more popular.
        
             | mrob wrote:
             | A real piano is also profoundly lacking in expressive
             | control over timbre (excluding extended techniques like
             | half-pedaling or directly touching the strings that hardly
             | ever show up in the repertoire). The only control the piano
             | gives you over note timbre is how hard you press the key.
             | Once you've done that, the hammer disconnects from the key
             | and flies through the air out of your control.
             | 
             | A keyboard with polyphonic aftertouch, such as the Yamaha
             | CS-80 (famously played by Vangelis), is objectively more
             | expressive than a piano.
        
           | butterchaos wrote:
           | I am both a classical guitar player and long time synth head.
           | 
           | "Everything is possible" is a bug and not a feature in many
           | ways.
           | 
           | It certainly is possible to synthesize an expressive
           | instrument to the level you describe but what usually happens
           | is you move on to something else.
           | 
           | "What does this knob do??" Wahahahaha
           | 
           | That kind of thing is just so much fun compared the guitar
           | that you have to actually learn to play.
        
         | analog31 wrote:
         | There are two levels to "everything is possible." First,
         | recorded music is a string of numbers, and any way of
         | generating those numbers will sound like it's intended to. But
         | synthesizing a desired sound is still an evolving process of
         | developing _useful_ interfaces and waveform generators.
         | 
         | Generating that sound in a live performance that is partially
         | or fully improvised is a harder problem.
         | 
         | The evolution of solutions to either problem depends on which
         | instrument you're interested in, and is based partially on
         | Means, Motive, and Opportunity. There's a reason to synthesize
         | a piano or Hammond organ, which is that they're hard to
         | transport and maintain. Less motive for synthesizing a violin.
        
       | andoando wrote:
       | Pitch is the frequency of the oscillation, timbre is the internal
       | structure of what's oscillating. Is that right at all?
        
         | hydrogen7800 wrote:
         | "Everything is overtones", or so I've heard somewhere. The
         | pitch, or note you hear from an instrument is the fundamental
         | frequency, and the combination of overtones determines the
         | timbre. These overtones are other sine waves at different
         | amplitudes and frequencies, and the combination of these are
         | instrument dependent. Additive synthesizers do this to
         | approximate "real" instruments.
        
           | taco_emoji wrote:
           | It's also the shape of the wave. Sawtooth waves are buzzier
           | or "brighter" than sine waves, for example.
        
             | analog31 wrote:
             | For periodic signals the waveform and the overtone series
             | precisely determine one another.
        
               | mrob wrote:
               | And the human ear is mostly insensitive to phase of those
               | overtones, so you can have waves with visually very
               | different waveform that sound identical.
        
             | andoando wrote:
             | And the shape of the wave is just a composition of more
             | waves :->
        
               | hydrogen7800 wrote:
               | This is a great visualization of fourier series.
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r18Gi8lSkfM
        
               | andoando wrote:
               | Man I wish my full time job was studying math.
        
           | relaxing wrote:
           | The combination of overtones, but also the change in volume
           | of those overtones over time.
        
             | scns wrote:
             | A thousand times this.
        
         | ta2112 wrote:
         | Yes, that sounds mostly right to my understanding. Exploring
         | the space of that internal structure is the point of the
         | article. Both pitch and timbre get remarkably complicated the
         | more they're looked in to.
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | Timbre is the quality that's left after you factor out the
         | pitch and intensity. How it "sounds".
        
       | giraffe_lady wrote:
       | I've gotten a lot of use out of thinking of genre in relation to
       | timbre. Not as the only relevant thing, but part of a
       | constellation.
       | 
       | In most genres you have a palette of timbres to work with for
       | each instrument based on the genre conventions. You can push at
       | the edges or add things in, but have to balance audience
       | expectations carefully as you do it. So for example the way an
       | electric bass sounds in contemporary metal is just not normally
       | going to "fit" into a chicago blues band, even though both are
       | heavily dependent on the sound of electric bass.
       | 
       | Different genres have different relationships to this constraint,
       | for example western classical has a huge palette available in an
       | orchestra but is relatively averse to using instrumentation
       | outside of that collection. Except in percussion, where there is
       | a lot more flexibility! Jazz has a fairly small & rigid set of
       | acceptable timbres for its core instruments, but is fairly
       | tolerant of experimenting with new instrumentation.
       | 
       | So then the two genre-timbre relationships I find most
       | interesting are electronic and pop. Pop is, more than any other
       | genre I think, curious about how timbre effects emotional
       | response in music. An album by the same artist could have a huge
       | range of different sounds for recognizable instruments, using the
       | tension between them for different effects.
       | 
       | And then large swaths electronic music are built largely around
       | active change of timbre over time through a piece. Something you
       | see used conservatively and carefully in most genres becomes
       | almost the central practice.
       | 
       | IDK it's hard to articulate and I'm not trying to set a
       | reductionist framework about how music sounds or anything. Just a
       | line of musical thought I've been exposed to and found valuable.
        
         | tetha wrote:
         | Well there is Dimmu Borgir, with an orchestra and a choir:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El4zsUZjsDc - and it is just
         | nuts. Yes that's 90 minutes, but watch 5 and then decide.
         | 
         | And that's why I love folk-ish metal so much.
         | 
         | Why shouldn't we have a lead/harmony violin on top of a metal
         | rhythm section? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F17sxgZdXZw
         | 
         | Or a hurdy gurdy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT7HqIP55tI
         | 
         | Or a pipa, which was btw very hilarious in poland:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwpKZtPBIEQ
         | 
         | I'm honestly thinking of dropping some money to get myself an
         | A-tuned drone flute[0]. Drone flutes sound really cool, and the
         | drone would be tuned to just about the highest two notes on the
         | guitar... and if you work with it a bit, drums/bass/rhythm
         | guitars helping with rhythms, chords and harmony could really
         | push that somewhere really interesting.
         | 
         | 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OlNNEuu88
        
       | hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
       | > Another way to think about timbre is by comparing instruments.
       | In an old stand-up bit, Steve Martin strummed the banjo and
       | mused, "You just can't sing a depressing song when you're playing
       | the banjo . . . You can't just go, 'Oh, death, and grief, and
       | sorrow, and murder.'
       | 
       | Anyone who's played Outer Wilds should disagree with this.[0]
       | 
       | To say we _can 't_ describe timbre is a bit misleading, because
       | there are concrete mathematical ways to analyze sounds; they
       | exist in a three-dimensional space of frequency, amplitude and
       | time. But that's helpful in the same way that describing
       | programming languages as collections of 1s and 0s is.
       | 
       | What's lacking for describing timbre, I suppose, are the steps
       | between "this sound is a sum of a particular arrangement of sine
       | waves" and "this sound is a piano". There are common terms such
       | as ADSR or "brightness" and "warmth" but those don't tell the
       | full story.
       | 
       | The question is, how valuable is that intermediate step when you
       | could just say "this is a piano, this is a banjo"?
       | 
       | [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR_wIb_n4ZU
        
         | tomjakubowski wrote:
         | I always thought the Outer Wilds OST was rather hopeful, in a
         | rustic kind of way, not depressing.
        
         | shagie wrote:
         | I'd also recommend Timber Zeal -
         | https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceBanjoMusic
         | https://timbrzeal.bandcamp.com/music ... and the Hardspace
         | Shipbreaker opening https://youtu.be/b4LbAr4uz9A
         | 
         | You certainly can do minor with a banjo.
        
           | adzm wrote:
           | Notably easy when you tune the B string to a B flat. Instant
           | minor!
        
           | scns wrote:
           | Thank you VERY much!
        
             | shagie wrote:
             | You might also find Hardspace: Shipbreaker - Music of Space
             | https://youtu.be/RX_56MiOnAk interesting.
             | 
             | > Watch our audio director Ben McCullough describes how he
             | created a unique audio environment and soundtrack for a
             | Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
        
         | tarentel wrote:
         | I don't know if I necessarily agree with that quote but your
         | counter example does not give me emotions of death, grief,
         | sorrow, or murder. It sounds very hopeful to me.
        
           | hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
           | And that just goes to show you how context-sensitive and
           | subjective the emotional quality of sounds and music is. Half
           | the people watching that video get teary-eyed when hearing it
           | :)
        
         | kazinator wrote:
         | A banjo is plinky-plonky: it has a sharp attack, but not a lot
         | of sustain. It's not great for playing a melody with long, slow
         | notes. It's better suited for rhythmical patterns, and faster
         | tempos. It's possible that a banjo could have a part in an
         | ensemble piece about death, grief, sorrow and murder, but as a
         | solo work, the idea does seem dodgy.
         | 
         | It's not so much the timbre as the envelope. We have ways to
         | talk about the not envelope. That is complex though, because
         | different components of the sound can have different envelopes:
         | e.g. high harmonics dying off before fundamentals. Envelope is
         | not separable from timbre.
        
         | pxc wrote:
         | > Anyone who's played Outer Wilds should disagree with this.
         | 
         | Not exactly about death, but certainly grieving things like the
         | emotional blunting of psychiatric medications, inability to
         | accept love or forgiveness, and lines like:
         | 
         | > I'll pretend bein' with you doesn't feel like drowning
         | 
         | Sounds decidedly less hopeful to me than that track from Outer
         | Wilds
         | 
         | live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psIRw0d509w
         | 
         | studio version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-XICfi4j3Q
        
         | mrob wrote:
         | >You can't just go, 'Oh, death, and grief, and sorrow, and
         | murder.'
         | 
         | There's a whole sub-genre about this that's commonly played on
         | banjo:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_ballad
        
       | wordsinaline wrote:
       | I've always thought of Jimi Hendrix as an example of timbre used
       | for revolutionary purpose. A lot of what he acheived he acheived
       | with timbre.
        
       | logrot wrote:
       | Timbre can vary a lot day by day on the same instrument.
       | 
       | Violin and the bow are both made of wood and a rainy damp day can
       | easily sound different than dry summer's day.
       | 
       | You can get good carbon fiber bows and they are much less weather
       | sensitive.
       | 
       | You can also get carbon fiber violins but I haven't heard one
       | that sounds as good as one made from wood.
        
       | elihu wrote:
       | > "Timbre's role in music has always been underrated, or even
       | ignored, probably because it is an intangible that's difficult to
       | describe, hard to categorize, and so far, immune to measurement.
       | "
       | 
       | In the mid-to-late 1800s, Herman Helmholtz was building
       | spectrographs of musical sounds by listening to them through a
       | bunch of resonators of varying sizes that acted as band-pass
       | filters, and recording how loud each harmonic sounded.
       | 
       | His writings are still relevant today.
       | 
       | https://www.amazon.com/Sensations-Tone-Dover-Books-Music/dp/...
       | 
       | I've heard that the Sethares book (which is much more recent) is
       | really good too, but I don't have a copy of that one.
       | 
       | https://www.amazon.com/Tuning-Timbre-Spectrum-William-Sethar...
        
       | alana314 wrote:
       | We can get closer to the mathematical definition of timbre by
       | talking about the strength of the harmonics
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRAXK4QKJ1Q
        
       | deltasepsilon wrote:
       | This story was _not_ submitted by tintinnabula.
       | 
       | I'm scandalized. /s
        
       | Barneyhill wrote:
       | I went to a interesting hackathon the other day focused on
       | building tools for exploring timbre in sound
       | https://comma.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/timbre-tools-hackathon/.
       | 
       | Was brilliant, a lot of groups focusing on the use of ML to
       | characterise the "unexplainable" in sound synthesis.
       | 
       | We ended up submitting a tool for interacting directly with
       | Ableton using LLM agents after becoming disenchanted with
       | text2audio models, wrote about it here -
       | https://montyanderson.net/writing/synthesis
        
         | butterchaos wrote:
         | Very cool. I will have to join "mod wiggler" lol.
         | 
         | I have been out of it so long muff wiggler is now mod wiggler.
         | Come on, that is absurd. Muff Wiggler was the best name ever.
        
       | muxator wrote:
       | The way a sound evolves in time contains a lot of timbrical
       | information.
       | 
       | Different harmonics have different ADSR curves (Attack, Decay,
       | Sustain, Release).
       | 
       | Above all, one cannot overstress the importance of the attack
       | transient. There are famous experiments in psychoacoustics that
       | show that, when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of
       | two different instruments may become hard to tell apart.
       | 
       | Personal anecdote: as a classic guitarist, it took me three years
       | of experimentation to find the right way to cut my fingernails in
       | order to have a better sound. The Electronic Engineer in me says
       | that those were three years spent to look for how to improve 0.1
       | seconds of noise at the start of each of my notes.
        
         | schwartzworld wrote:
         | > when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of two
         | different instruments may become hard to tell apart
         | 
         | A neat trick is playing guitar through a volume pedal. You mute
         | the sound, pluck a string and then swell in the volume pedal.
         | The rest of the ASDR envelope can be created with other effects
         | like delays.
        
       | superb-owl wrote:
       | Highly recommend the book "Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale" for
       | engineers interested in music theory
       | 
       | https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html
        
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