1995
Sound character and sound textures
Sound character and sound textures
We have an innate sense of what I call sound character.
It is inherent in our spoken language, though unconscious. It is a language we superimpose on our verbal language. We speak it by shaping the contours of tone and emphasis of our speech and also by adjusting the sound of different parts of the words -- the rise and fall of pitch and loudness and the timbre of our phonemes. It tells the listener how to interpret the meaning of our words.
A part of this language is also used in music as a dimension called timbre or sound color.
It was introduced in western music with the development of orchestration: a dimension of musical meaning inherent in the nature of the sound itself, superimposed upon the melody and harmony. In music of this kind you have only part of the work if you just play the melody and harmony on the piano without its orchestral color. In this music, though, sound color is only part of the meaning -- melody, harmony and rhythm still play a part: we can still recognize the piece without the orchestra when we play it on the piano.
I have been interested in going further, distilling this color essence, what I believe to be part of an inborn, aural, transcultural language, having it be the sole carrier of meaning in a sound work. That's what I do when I build a sound texture in a Place work.
M.N.