North American Rain Forest


Timbre Project

This is an informal project which combines my research in philosophy of perception with a long standing interest in electronic music and new methods of composition.


The driving question behind the project is: how can psychological and philosophical theories of timbre perception inform the use of timbre in music composition?


With the development of electronic techniques for sound production—both creation of sounds from scratch and manipulation of sampled sounds—musicians and composers now have an unprecedented power to control timbre. However, what should they do with this power? There is no "music theory of timbre" anything like the rich theories which have developed to guide composers in arranging pitches and rhythms. Is such a theory possible? What would it look like?


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