Orchestrating timbre - unfolding  processes of timbre and memory in improvisational piano performance

Magda Mayas

The doctoral research investigates the orchestration of timbre from a performer’s perspective. Through the dissertation, I explore orchestration as means to “unfold” improvisational processes. The foundation of the work lies in my practice as a pianist in the realm of improvised music, in which I often use preparations and objects as extensions of the instrument. Whilst timbre is often understood as a purely sonic perceptual phenomenon, this view of timbre does not accord with its use within con- temporary site-specific improvisational practice. This research grew out of the need to explore the potentiality of timbre, and to renew and situate it within my own practice. Through the research, I argue that a range of aspects that exceed the purely sonic—for instance, changing spatial circumstances, the affordances and agency of instruments and objects, and the performer’s movements and gestures— all impact upon a performance and the listening experience. All of these aspects need to be taken into account in understanding and working with timbre. In this dissertation, I introduce and argue for an extended and situated understanding of timbre in relation to material, space, and body that recognizes timbre’s complexity and embraces its potential to contribute to an ethical engagement with the contextual environment. I understand these material, spatial, and embodied relations to be non-hierarchical, inseparable, and in constant flux, and to require continuously re-configuration without being reduced or simplified. This timbral approach, which navigates multiple media beyond the sonic, radiates throughout my research. From a performer’s perspective, I define “orchestrating” timbre as the attentive re-organization of these active agents and the creation of musical structures on micro and macro levels through the sculpting and transitioning of timbre— spatially, temporally, physically, and mentally—within a variety of com- positional frameworks. Understanding timbre in this way requires that we recognize the multiple and complex roles that memory plays in contemporary improvisational practice. I therefore introduce the term timbral memory in order to describe how I use memory strategically as means to gain knowledge about improvisational processes undertaken in line with an extended understanding of timbre. In the course of the research, I conducted four investigative projects that were integrated into my practice, which were further extended through collaborations with sound engineers, an instrument builder, and a choreographer. The resulting practice-based research explores multiple, combined, artistic, and analytical approaches to timbre: I use systematic mappings to detail vocabulary and technique, explore amplification and recording in the creation of spatial compositions, em- ploy a custom-built device for live spatialization as a means to expand and deepen spatiotimbral relationships, adopt gestural approaches in composing timbre choreographies, and articulate a range of diverse perspectives through dialogues and interviews with other practitioners. Taken together, these diverse studies constitute an exploration of both timbral memory as a structural, reflective, and performative tool, and the creation of performing and listening modes as integrated parts of timbre orchestration. The thesis opposes the notion of generalizable, reproducible, and transferable techniques and instead offers detailed and intimate approaches to technique and material, describing object timbre, action timbre, and gesture timbre as active agents in sound-producing processes. Orchestrating timbre forms a hybrid compositional approach, which can be applied to various improvisational contexts and which, by engaging with dynamic relationships, reconfigures them; in this, it offers a way of understanding and using the potentials that instrument-body-space interactions afford. By reaching beyond the sonic, my research makes a contribution to the field of critical improvisation studies. It addresses practitioners and audiences in music and sound art alike, attempting to constitute a bridge from artistic research in music—which is often viewed and treated as a self-contained discipline—into multiple artistic fields, in order to inspire discussions, creation and education in broader audiences.

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E. Performative Timbre

“Performative Timbre” is an intensive listening study of a small selection of my piano vocabulary, which uses a subjective similarity measurement. The study was developed and conceptualized in collaboration with Palle Dahlstedt, between autumn 2017 and spring 2019.

I performed the study using an adaptation of the Timbre Space method and in line with an extended understanding of timbre.

Focusing on my idiosyncratic sonic vocabulary, the project revealed qualities of timbre in relation to objects, playing methods, and the gestures used to produce sound.

My aim lay in finding out how and why I group certain sounds together: was this pure habit, or intuition, or a question of personal aesthetics and taste, or simply a pragmatic decision to do with the possibilities and limitations of body and instrument, or was it related to an underlying artistic logic? How do I listen to and structure my sound material in improvised music performance? How do I orches- trate timbre? These research questions formed the outset for this study.

In late 2017, I made recordings of a large number of sounds produced with the piano, which form an integral part of my vocabulary, and chose 50 sounds out of those recordings to represent through a small, selective, sound catalogue. A custom-built software tool developed by Palle Dahlstedt enabled me to listen to all possible sound pairs in a randomized order, 1,225 in total, and to compare these sounds to each other by focusing on various details and asking specific questions about them.

The questions focused on similarity of the sounds in relation to objects, playing methods, physical gesture, and overall timbre, resulting in 4 rounds of listening with a total number of 4,900 sound pairs, which I listened to and compared over a period of a few months. This resulted in four sets of collected data, which are represented in 4 perceptual timbre maps.

The enduring and repetitive nature of this comparative listening study generated different listening modes, heightened my awareness of the compositional capacities of timbre in improvised music making, articulated and confirmed my understanding of instrumental technique and had a transformative effect on my artistic practice.

 For a detailed discussion of this study see chapter 4 of the thesis.
 

To conduct the study, Palle Dahlstedt built a software tool which enabled me to listen to all possible sound pairs out of the 50 chosen sounds in random order. I would then give the pair a (dis)similarity rating based on different perceptive performance qualities and the questions I had placed at the center of the study. The tool randomly picked sound pairs, without revealing the names or descriptions of the sounds I was listening to. I then compared sound A to sound B and rated it on a scale from 0, very different, to 1, very similar.

The tool stored my ratings and I could go back one step if I thought I made a mistake, which enabled me to conduct one listening session over a longer period of time.

This way of randomizing the order and listening to sound pairs in all possible combinations also enabled me to hear each sound in many different contexts and to observe how it changed perceptually in response to what I had listened to prior to listening to it, taking on different meanings and impacting my perception of it. Another function built into the tool was playing sounds simultaneously, overlapping them, or listening to them in succession.

Software Tool

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