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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: About Timbre and Audio.
Post Subject: Timbre from the musicians viewPosted by rowuk on: 12/7/2019
It is excellent that Timbre is described here as color. This is actually how musicians speak about it. The problem with the comparison to photography is that color with a musical instrument is a moving target. If we take my own instrument, the trumpet, we can change the color based on loudness (softly played notes are “darker” than loudly played ones. We can also change color in the duration of a note. We can change the listeners perception of timbre by the strength of our articulation. A harder tonguing gives the listener the impression of more odd overtones. This effect applies to all acoustic instruments. More overtones means more resultant tones (sum and difference tones).
Throughout the history of the trumpet, there has been a struggle - one direction of development was to promote low, middle and high register with different timbre. These for instance were the trumpets that Mahler, Bruckner, Strauss and Wagner wrote for. The low register was fat, full and rich sounding. The middle octave is very clear and the upper octave is very brilliant. This characteristic created a much different section sound in the brass. This sound approach was followed by the germanic countries, Italy and to a certain extent England. All of the original renaissance and baroque instruments worked like this.
The other direction was to “homogenize” the sound. This was the direction of the French starting around 1850 and later the Americans. The various octaves were designed to sound the same. This is pretty much all that we find these days (with the possible exception of Vienna).
Unfortunately, only the historically informed players follow the former traditions. They do not get much opportunity for Bruckner, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler, Wagner performances.
Desired Timbre changed about every 50 years or so since the 1500s. This is exemplified in how the instruments are built. As orchestras got bigger and the scoring more complex, we speak about moving in and out of the “orchestral fabric”. Changing timbre makes the movement in the fabric less “predictable”/controllable by the conductor.
New generation trumpets are much louder than vintage ones. Getting appreciable brilliance means VERY LOUD. Now orchestras have to find schemes to protect the hearing of the players.

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