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From: sandell@ils.nwu.edu (Greg Sandell)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Timbre Perception and Orchestration
Message-ID: <2151@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu>
Date: 18 Jun 91 16:00:27 GMT
References: <2118@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu> <1991Jun17.170258.17498@agate.berkeley.edu>
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Reply-To: sandell@ils.nwu.edu (Greg Sandell)
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In article <1991Jun17.170258.17498@agate.berkeley.edu>, maverick@mahogany.Berkeley.EDU (Vance Maverick) writes:

> -- particularly since Boulez personally takes the position that
> timbre is just icing on the cake of pitch.

Can you think of a particular source where he says this?  

> Will you have time, in your thesis, to take on the pedagogical
> aspects of the teaching of orchestration?  Surely the goal of an
> orchestration course is to enable the composer to hear the
> combination of instruments mentally; such apparent prescriptions as
> R-K's dictum about flutes softening the combination of clarinets and
> oboes may serve their real function when, armed with knowledge of a
> score, the student listens for this effect, and hears, not
> "softness", but the sound of flutes, clarinets and oboes.  

What are the mechanics of the orchestrator's ear, though?  When
you hear bass clarinet and cello, does your mind automatically recognize
it as a learned sound, "bass clarinet and cello", or does it first decompose
the sound into "bass clarinet" and "cello"?  Well maybe for such
frequently used combinations as that one (especially for dramatic effect
in late-19th cent. opera), the first mechanism applies.  But what about
the infinite number of other timbre combinations (different instruments,
dynamics, registers, etc.)?  If I want to learn from someone else's
orchestration (whether I have just the recording or the score as well),
I need to be able to (1) decompose the sound, and (2) hypothesize about
the process behind the sum effect.  That's what the listener does with
the flutes/clarinets/oboes example.

I think alot has been said about visual perception of color mixture
which pertains to the issue of timbre mixture.  I have experienced
firsthand some surprising effects while playing with colors on color
computer monitor.  Say you have text on top of a background, and you
want to find a combination of colors for foreground (the text) and
background.  Suppose I found a foreground color I like and I'm
sampling various backgrounds.  I swear that somehow different background
colors shift the hue, saturation and brilliance of the foreground colors!
Perceptually, of course they are...because of nifty things like Mach
bands and the eye's natural tendency to supply the complementary hue
of each color (i.e. when you look at a bright red light, close your
eyes and see green).  What we need in orchestration is an explanation of
how certain timbres affect others in the perceptual ear.  I think the
two modalities are very analogous in the subject of mixture.

But to answer your question about pedagogy, I am going to provide 
a review of several English-language orchestration manuals of the
current century, but mainly concerning what they say about evaluating
concurrent timbres.  Besides, very few have much to say about how
a student should gradually acquire a good ear for orchestration.  One
of the only exceptions is a curious little article by J. Ott, "A new
approach to orchestration," THE INSTRUMENTALIST 23/9 (April 1969),
pp. 53-55.  He suggests that students embark on a exploration of their
own personal timbre space by vocally imitating all the instruments of
the orchestra and categorizing them according to the vowels they
use to make the sounds.

> think computer representations of the sounds of instruments are far
> enough along that we could write software to help teach composers
> this skill of the mental ear?

It would be great, wouldn't it?  There are certainly alot of sounds
available on compact disk of orchestral instruments (McGill and 
ProSonus), but the number of instrumental sounds you could store in a
sound library will always be miniscule compared to what performers
can do.  But even if there were a limited set of online orchestral
instrument sounds available on a menu-driven system for combining
sounds, think how much you could learn about combinations that you
didn't know before.

> 
> 	Vance
> 
Thanks for helping make this an interesting discussion and to get my
gears turning.

- Greg

Greg Sandell
sandell@ils.nwu.edu