Notes from the Timbre Space
Daniel Warner · Perspectives of New Music · 1982
This essay is a result of some compositional encounters in computer-generated music which involve the specification of timbral on a par with those of pitch and rhythm. The extent to which these issues pervade one's compositional world is not surprising, given the relatively large amount of information required by a computer to produce even a single note. What is surprising, though, is the speed with which one's notions about timbral identity, informed largely by experiences on more conventional musical turf, are replaced by questions about what happens when we invent structures out of aural impressions,1 computer-generated, string quartet-generated, or otherwise.