Hacker News Reader

Comment by taco_emoji | Hacker News Reader

"Terroir" is a terrible way to metaphorize timbre. The only similarity is that they're both hard to describe. Terroir is there before the wine is made and can't really be controlled by the winemaker (except insofar as they choose where to plant or what grapes to blend). Timbre is absolutely under the control of the musician.

View on HN

> Terroir is there before the wine is made and can't really be controlled by the winemaker (except insofar as they choose where to plant or what grapes to blend).

I've met winemakers who think of planting in terms of multigenerational experiments with highly intentional controls for different aspects of soil and micro-climate that may vary on a scale of a single meter, who work to find and train their successors because they will not see the results of some of these experiments in their lifetimes; winemakers who absolutely understand that blending is not just a linear combination of the characteristics of blended wines, but a truly complicated system where certain flavors may heighten others; winemakers who rely on centuries of experience in how funguses and other microorganisms can be used in safe and flavor-enhancing ways.

Winemaking is engineering, just as musical instrument design is (both physical and digital), and just as building a startup is. The presence of human subjectivity as an evaluating oracle in a complex system does not imply that its creators work without intention or without rigorous systems-level thinking.

As a string player, terroir strikes me as a beautifully appropriate way to describe timbre. My instrument was constructed in the 19th century, probably in Germany. The luthier, their choice of wood, the shape, the workmanship, the strings, the bow, the weather, the player, the room, the mood, the other players all affect the sound. A large portion of the job of an instrumentalist is choosing which tools to use. There are always compromises, and many variables that effect the timbre simply are before a note is played, and have to be worked with.

I think the sense is more they're both about hundreds of unique physical characteristics, some of which are perhaps unquantifiable.

The shape of an instrument, the material used, the type of strings, their tension, the temperature and humidity in the room. The way each player holds it, the size of their hands, the specific strength of their fingers. Some of these factors stay constant, others change from day to day or player to player. The sum of all of these together creates a specific timbre.

Thanks, that analogy bugged me a lot and I couldn't get why a farmable region was similar to a variable sound envelope.

A terroir is totally describable, as by definition you have uniform geological and climatic properties (on the other hand if it can't be delimited it's not a terroir)

I think this is just another point of frustration with trying to define timbre. There's definitely some points directly under control: attack and brightness come to mind. Then there's some that are less directly under control: the room and the instrument itself.

It's no accident that musicians spend a lot of money on instruments -- even electric guitar players -- an instrument that is electronically amplified and often distorted and otherwise augmented -- will have strong feelings about the particular type of guitar they use. Leaving shape-based decisions out of it (and pickups), hollow bodies are going to produce a different sound than solid. Different wood types will produce different tonal characteristics.

So the things that are directly controlled are less like terroir, more like choice of grape used maybe? While the make of the instrument, the shape of the room a recording was made in, these are much more like terroir I think.

But it's probably just not a great metaphor.

>Different wood types will produce different tonal characteristics.

True for acoustic guitars, but for electric guitars this is thoroughly debunked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE

Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36106674

TIL! I grew up hearing about it so much from the broader guitar community that I just took it as truth.

The idea holds across many acoustic instruments though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com