09 Dec Some thoughts on timbre
This last week has been pretty busy, so I din’t have much time to work on new music. But I did have time to do some research and to ask myself some questions.
The first and most critical question is: what am I missing in my scores? What is my music lacking?
I can surely learn from the classic composers, but I have to compare my music with something more similar and more modern. I sure love Debussy and jazz music, but I need to search into a more specific category: music applied to visual art. Yes, that’s my current bachelor’s degree, but I have to admit that we are studying a lot of rules and we are analysing a lot of music from the XVIII-XIX centuries, but I would love to dig into Thomas Newman’s or Michael’s Giacchino’s scores.
Since I’m currently working on Spirits of the Forest I thought it could be interesting to focus on a well known soundtrack: Ori and the Blind Forest. So I listened to some of the tracks and realised that the most obvious difference between my music and other’s is that I don’t really know how to use TIMBRE.
Music is something incredibly complex, but can be divided into specific areas. There is PITCH of course, that is technically called frequency: different notes have different frequencies, but this is not quite enough to create a melody. Because you also need to organise such frequencies in TIME, or tempo. Now you have all the tools you need to create music.
But that’s not quite true, to be honest. There is a massively important feature that is called TIMBRE, and it is crucial to understand why there are so many instruments and why we like a singer better than another. I will not explain in fine detail what timbre is in acoustics, but I will describe it as the colour of each sound. Mothers can clearly identify their children’s voice even in the noisiest room: that’s because each voice has some specific attributes that make it unique – and allow you to immediately recognise the voice of your loved ones. As with fingerprints and the iris, we all have our own distinctive voice, and the same goes for the diverse instruments.
You can clearly tell if there’s a piano or a guitar playing the same note: so what’s the point of timbre? As I said you can analogise timbre to colour: you can use just one or you can use several colours on a white canvas. It is something to use with awareness and balance and it’s pretty difficult to master. There are no right or wrong instruments to use, but there are rules to pair them and there are ranges for each one in which they shine and the players feel comfortable with. There are also timbres created by multiple instruments, like the strings – the section has its own timbre that’s different from a violin solo.
So the answer to my first question is: I have to master the timbre.