Following that, we had a good discussion of different
timbre-perception theories. We couldn't get to everyone's research,
but below are links to on-line resources a number of you discovered
(as well as links to the fun meow mix video and others.
See below.)
My article, which I guess I just didn't find a segway into during the discussion, is titled "Perceptual Restoration of Obliterated Sounds," which is a cool-sounding way of introducing the idea that the brain makes things up when they are interrupted. The research was headed by a guy named Richard Warren -- I seem to remember his name coming up last night, though maybe I'm just making that up...The section that I focused on, the first one, talks about Temporal Induction, which describes how when one (relatively constant) sound/signal is played and then interrupted by a second, also relatively constant, sound/signal, the first sound lingers in the mind regardless of whether or not the first signal is included in the second. Essentially, Warren claims that the brain cannot accept abrupt changes and creates replicas of interrupted or displaced sounds which we perceive in our 'mind's ear' (if such a thing could be said to exist). Later in the section, he redefines this phenomenon when it occurs with changing sound as 'contextual concatenation.' Fun words!
I did mine on Smalley - sort of. I actually found a paper online by David Hirst which purported to be both a good, general overview of Smalley's ideas as presented in 'Spectromorphology'- but also a guide to developing a practical analysis vocabulary to put the Smalley ideas into action on a single piece of music. I thought that sounded great - but the paper I found, once I got to the end, was only part 1 of the project - and I don't know where part 2 (the practical application of Smalleynian vocab) is.So basically I just made a little presentation that was Hirst summarizing some of Smalley's concepts.
Here's a Denis Smalley bit I read which related quite a bit to our discussions today on expectations and such. He's pretty unconcerned with it on a scientific level, and instead seems to rigidly define these things conceptually as relationships between musical gestures (on the one level notes, another instrument hits, and further still those that are ambiguous or removed) and our perceptions etc...
[The article] talks a bit about the affects of alternating pitches and the speed after which they seem to sound more like harmonics. It was also pretty interesting to hear about the affects of removing a note every once in a while, and how the human ear still seems to think that it's coming from a distinct source.
Last week I was planning to talk about composer Julio Estrada's theory of macro timbre. It's based on the idea that rhythm and sound belong to the same frequency continuum (chronoacoustics). He claims that this theory brings acoustic composition closer to digital synthesis techniques.In his own words, "...macro-timbre resembles a fluid, flexible matter whose movements have to be fixed with extreme delicacy. Let us imagine, for instance, that we listen to all the movements of a melody only through simple changes of intensity: if the melody goes up or down, the intensity will be listened to as increasing or decreasing, which, consequently, will make the intensity a factor almost as important as the pitch. This process takes place in each one of the initial components and it creates a relatively similar macro-timbre. The variation is not in the form: it occurs in the perception." (Estrada)
Below are links to his string quartet ishini'ioni recorded by the Arditti quartet (score and mp3), which is a good example of how he uses macro timbre in composition. The original material of ishini'ioni is a continuous graph which, by means of curves, records the spatial-temporal changes of each rhythmic and sonic component of the macro-timbre (total of six components).