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Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

> "Timbre’s role in music has always been underrated, or even ignored, probably because it is an intangible that’s difficult to describe, hard to categorize, and so far, immune to measurement. "

In the mid-to-late 1800s, Herman Helmholtz was building spectrographs of musical sounds by listening to them through a bunch of resonators of varying sizes that acted as band-pass filters, and recording how loud each harmonic sounded.

His writings are still relevant today.

https://www.amazon.com/Sensations-Tone-Dover-Books-Music/dp/...

I've heard that the Sethares book (which is much more recent) is really good too, but I don't have a copy of that one.

https://www.amazon.com/Tuning-Timbre-Spectrum-William-Sethar...

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The quoted section of the article is pretty out of touch with modern music. Many (most?) genres of EDM place the importance of timbre and texture above harmony and melody

That was mentioned in the article.

> Timbre is even more crucial in contemporary genres such as electronic dance music and rap. EDM, said Swoger-Ruston, is really “experimentation with timbre.” The widespread use of sampling means the sample, not the note, is increasingly the basic unit of music.

I think where the article is out-of-touch is implying that timbre is still largely a mystery, when actually, for the most part, it isn't.

Yeah, well frankly most EDM fucking sucks and that's pretty much why. Your average cool guy "producer" doesn't know the first thing about intervals, counterpoint, or even basics like triads or major/minor scales. But they sure can twist knobs in a way that makes neat sounds!

Judging a piece based on its technical merit or the artist’s education is extremely limited and pretentious. There’s a tremendous amount of beautiful music made on laptops by people who have no formal training or knowledge of theory. Not everything full of synthesisers and samples is “EDM”.

> Not everything full of synthesisers and samples is “EDM”.

I didn't assert this.

> Yeah, well frankly most EDM fucking sucks and that's pretty much why. Your average cool guy "producer" doesn't know the first thing about intervals, counterpoint, or even basics like triads or major/minor scales. But they sure can twist knobs in a way that makes neat sounds!

That's a pretty harsh objective take for a highly subjective topic.

A lot of people like it - myself included. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not valid.

I didn't say I didn't like some EDM. Some is made by very talented people.

At least they have more talent than I've seen in a lot of the newer rap artists, who apparently can't leave home without an auto-tune box handy.

EDM at least has to be considered, and likely, no matter how crap it is, someone put some sort of effort into it. Speaking into a pitch bender takes nothing but breath, and I'm stuck listening to this garbage in traffic every day.

That's not true either. Look at something like Carlie XCX - Pop 2, the autotune is doing interesting things. I'm sure it's not just the technology of it, but also the technique.

Also moving back to one of the most well known autotune users T-Pain is a great singer without the technology. It's obvious there's more to it then just auto-aim function.

Some people use it that way, but it doesn't mean the technology is fundamentally limited to that scope.

First of all, who cares?

But that aside, this take reeks of sampling bias. Every amateur with a laptop uploads their music to SoundCloud/Youtube/whatever even while they are still learning. You probably don’t have much exposure to the crappy piano fugues and poorly orchestrated droning sonatas that are written by early university students. Trust me there’s a lot of that as well. Everyone starts somewhere after all.

To quote from Computer Music by Dodge and Jerse (an excellent reference),

"Helmholtz concluded that the spectral description of a sound had the most straitforward correlation with its timbre.... For instance the qualitative description of 'brilliant' or 'bright' characterizes spectra that have a great deal of energy at high frequencies [e.g. brass instruments] ... A spectrum with little energy in the even-numbered harmonics characterizes the particular timbre that is produced by the clarinet in its low register...." (2nd Ed. Section 2.6)

Understanding that each instrument produces a spectrum of harmonics peculiar to it ... and that those harmonics have relatively different pitches and amplitudes and evolutions ... that vary with how the instrument is played ... is key to quantifying its timbre.

(At first, not an easy thing to grasp let alone quantify. But Partch made a lot of progress!)

I visited conservatoire des arts et metiers museum in Paris a couple years ago. It is full of fascinating scientific devices from the past. Among then was the timbre analyser. I was blown away. A purely analogic spectrum analyser.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Timbre_analyser-CNAM...

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