Timbral Environments: An Ecological Approach to the Cognition of Timbre

2011

This study formulates an ecological framework that links the environment and human systems, to support further arguments on the influence of timbre in the music appreciation schemata. At the core of the framework is the notion of timbral environments, which is introduced as an epistemological foundation to characterize perceptual cues of internalized representations of music, and to explore how these are expressed in the dynamics of diverse external environments. The proposed notion merges the concepts of macrotimbre (Sandell, 1998) and soundscape (Schafer, 1977) to distinguish between the formulated framework and traditional approaches to timbre, which are mainly concerned with short-term …

The role of timbre in the memorization of microtonal intervals

2007