-‘Every something
is an echo of nothing’ - John Cage.
-‘They did not
speak. They did not sing, they remained, all of them, silent, almost
determinedly silent; but from the empty air they conjured music. Everything was
music...’ -Franz Kafka, Investigations of a Dog.
-‘Every mark on a
piece of paper, every mark, is acoustic.’ - Susan
Howe.
Timbre is the poem when it
happens.
The concept of timbre has
been used since ancestral times as a listening for, as well as a listening
through. A ‘listening activity’ that in Sumerian times was synonym
with ‘reading’ for Sumerian and Akkadian languages have no word for
‘reading’. Still today we may use the colloquial form Do you read me? to
express a ‘listening’ for a kind of vibrating quality of the perception of the
sense (direction); that is, sentir, to feel, to hear or
understand.
The origins of the word timbre
approximate to the skin resonance of language: the skin surface of a percussion
instrument that talks through the deployment of its resonance. The term stems
from the Greek tympanon, that is tambourine or timpani
(kettledrums) and, before that, from the Semitic top, tuppim, also
meaning tambourine. It can also be associated with the sistrum, an
ancient musical instrument that has small rings or loops of thin metal which
merged with the tambourine (the name derives from the Greek verb σείω, seio,
to shake; its name in the ancient Egyptian language was sekhem (sḫm),
one of the 7 souls, meaning force. The word timbre entered English with
different meanings at several different times from the Old French. The French
etymology of the word also seems to be associated to a drum in 1170. It was
first used in English in the 12th century to mean a type of kettledrum
(translating the biblical Latin 'tympanum'), and later also to mean a
tambourine and various types of bells (14th century). Various other derivative
meanings developed in the Middle Ages including a helmet or skull cap, a
heraldic crest and an official seal. The modern meaning apparently arose only
in the 19th century, first meaning 'sound of a bell', then 'sonorous quality of
any instrument or of a voice', and finally (1853) ‘character or quality’
of a sound, which is equivalent to the German Klangfarbe (tone colour),
essentially its current meaning, which associates the concept of vibration
(ear-drum) with that of colour and texture. Helmholtz used the German Klangfarbe
(tone colour), and Tyndall proposed an English translation, clangtint.
The French term timbre identifies the object that actually creates the
sound, the German term klangfarben is more abstract and detaches the
sound from any source.
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