Seminar Abstract

8 Nov 2006:
Speaker: Alicja Knast
Venue:     Devonport Lecture Theatre, Portland Square
Time:       14:00

Timbre – a ‘fingerprint’ or an universal? Tracing similarities of timbre in speech and music

Timbre is generally seen as being unique, local and exclusive for a given representation of music. It carries ‘identity’ and meanings. This kind of statement arises some questions: how can mechanisms of generation of timbre be mapped? Is it exclusively an individual (subjective) feature (both in its plausible perception and production) and can therefore be only interpreted as a non-universal musical component across human population?

Following various disciplines, which consistently point out an overlapping between speech and music processing, this research concentrates on comparing both activities and extracting the regularities found in either recordings of speech and of music. The material for this analysis includes recordings with a good representation of traditional music in the given area, examples of preferably casual speech in the language used by the performer, topographically separated cases, examples of solo musical performance on stringed instruments, etc.

As a result, small divergences in certain frequency regions for speech and music seem to be representative for a given culture. Also, the variability index (nPVI) proposed for rhythm and prosody by Patel & Iverson in 2006 has been applied to timbre, what enabled the comparison of timbre across cultures within long-term sequences.

The notion that music and its timbre is a product of enculturation can be challenged by the regularities found hereby: when speech and performance are treated as one unit of timbre generation, it simplifies the research on the area.