Thoughts from Teaching Timbre in 2023

I spent the second half of last week in the UK, doing an in-depth dive on spectrograms at both Goldsmiths and Cambridge. It’s always interesting to teach this, especially at the undergraduate level, since it’s the type of material that comes up in some music and something else type programs and from the more hip music theorists.

While I enjoy giving my spin on what does it mean to do research on timbre, where I wanted to go once we had covered the basics (e.g. how do we go from waveform representations to the spectrogram; discussing links between vocal formants, timbre, and vowel perception; how have tools like MDS been used to model timbre space) was thinking about new ways in which we might further research these ideas in a more applied way. There’s of course only so much time in an hour, so covering all of what they might ‘need to know’ and then thinking about applications might be too ambitious for a single hour, I was wondering where some of the conversations would go next were we given more time to talk about this.

I, in particular, was quite interested in thinking about (as always…) pedagogical applications of some of this research. So much of the taught materials involve talking about how important the envelope of a sound is for our perception. Students often like to hear about studies where people chop off the attack of a note then listeners have trouble identifying the instrument playing.

Given this research, I wonder how much of this could influence instrument pedagogy.

For example, trumpet players are very interested in developing their sound.

From personal experience, it’s very easy to tell if someone has been playing trumpet for only a few years. It’s also possible to tell whom has influenced a more advanced player if you listen to them play and improvise.

In order to develop one’s sound, trumpet players are encouraged to play lots and lots of long tones. You play so many that doing long tones ends up becoming some sort of spiritual practice.

But when playing long tones myself, I sometimes put on my scientist hat (so to speak) and wonder exactly what are the mechanisms that I am developing when I am developing my sound?

This sort of thinking in many ways betrays my love of the more effortless mastery, inner game, Bill Adams approach to playing, but it’d be naive to think that both can exist simultaneously.

With the science hat on, I wonder what parts of the waveform are linked to which parts of our perception of a mature trumpet sound? What’s going on at the level of the signal?

Presumably we are learning to create richer activation in the upper harmonics of our sound in a way that resonates both with our instrument and our bodies (while playing in tune!). But that sentiment is about the sound and not about the more physical characteristics of the wave that makes this sound possible.

And how much of it really has to do with the long part of the long tone? Referring to the research from above, we know the envelope of a sound has massive implications concerning our perception of it. Is a trumpet player’s time better spent really refining their articulations? If so, how might we better show these differences in a pedagogical context?

Who knows. At the end of the day, a player will have to do both and practicing long tones is not just about sound, relates to air flow, endurance, dynamics, aperture control.

The point of this is not to overhaul the pedagogy of some instruments with the dull knife of empirical research. The point of introducing these concepts would more, in my opinion, give students something more concrete to latch on to in their perception.

You really can only be as good as you can hear and sometimes that means showing people what it is possible to hear.

I also think there’d be a lot to be gained using spectrograms (and some sort of melody extraction method) to talk about the many ways in which in which Western music notation fail us to capture what is interesting about improvisations in jazz (something I know many of music music theory colleagues do).

I love returning to the idea of Feyerabend discussing how the telescope gave Galileo the observational language to talk about a version of the universe that seemed irrational and radical at the time. Is there a parallel in what we might see when we look through the spectrogram and are able to learn something new about our own musical universe?

I’m not trying to stir up too much hype around something like this. If used in this way, spectrograms (and tuners!) are very much like the cops of pedagogy, as in they only show give you information that a crime has been committed and do nothing to prevent it.

But used in a non-punitive way, I do think there’s a lot more value that we as music educators could be deriving from tools like the spectrogram, especially if they provide real time feedback and we can tell students what is needed to correct any issues.

And even more generally, I think that if we had a more mechanistic understanding of these links between the sound itself and the mind-body-environment that produced it, this would allow us to be much more effective at talking more precisely about the sound. This would be especially helpful for younger players.