Minding the Gap: Conceptualizing “Perceptualized” Timbre in Music Analysis

Johnson R.

Fales C.

Lerdahl F.

Saariaho K.

In this article, I discuss the use of musical timbre and harmony, and their relations, taking examples from my own works. I discuss also the use of the computer in composition and musical research. Speaking of timbre, I introduce the sound/noise axis, which I use to create musical tension and to replace the dynamic function of harmony. Along this axis, generally speaking, “noise” replaces the concept of dissonance and “sound” that of consonance. The axis is, nevertheless, only one‐dimensional, and I wonder if there might be ways to organize timbre in more complex — hierarchical? — ways. In my work with the computer I seek ways of combining in a concrete way timbre and harmony, for example by using similar models for building sounds themselves and their pitch organizations.

Lewin D.

Recent years have seen an increasing influence on music theory of perceptual investigations that can be called phenomenological in the sense of Husserl, either explicitly or implicitly. The trend is problematic, particularly in what one might call its sociology, but it is also very promising. Potential or at least metaphorical links with Artificial Intelligence are especially suggestive. A formal model for "musical perceptions," incorporating some of the promising features, reveals interesting things in connection with Schubert's song Morgengruβ. The model helps to circumvent some traditional difficulties in the methodology of music analysis. But the model must be used with caution since, like other perceptual theories, it appears to make " listening" a paradigmatic musical activity. Composer/ performer/playwright/actor/director/poet can be contrasted here to listener/reader. The two genera can be compared in the usual ways, but also in some not-so-usual ways. The former genus may be held to be perceiving in the creative act, and some influential contemporary literary theories actually prefer members of this genus to those of the other as perceivers. The theories can be modified, I believe, to allow a more universal stance that also regards acts of analytic reading/listening as poetry.

Manoury P.

Mo Y.

Among the basic elements of music, timbre is one of the most important elements of sound, and it is also the main basis for distinguishing one pronunciation from another. People usually have the ability to “listen and argue” because everyone’s pronunciation is different. However, the existing audio extraction technology has low efficiency and low accuracy. Therefore, this paper aims to discuss the algorithm that can make music timbre feature extraction more accurate and efficient. For audio signal feature extraction, this paper proposed an audio feature based on harmonic components to describe the harmonic structure information in the audio signal spectrum. The algorithm in this paper extracts timbre features from the sound data of Western musical instruments and national musical instruments and analyzes the recognition accuracy. The experimental results showed that the classification accuracy of the four feature extractors is above 92%, among which B has the worst effect, with an accuracy of 92.42%, and D has the best classification effect, with an accuracy of 99.15%, which shows that the feature extraction algorithm designed in this paper combined with the traditional feature extraction algorithm can achieve better results.