Layers of Meaning:
Teaching Instrumentation and Texture

Megan Lavengood

Texas Society for Music Theory, February 23, 2024

Bibliography

I think you’re supposed to begin these things with a relatable vignette, so here is mine. When I first began studying music theory, like a lot of new students, I was interested in using music theory and analysis to explore what made my like my favorite music, and at that time, my favorite music was Sufjan Stevens and especially his 2005 concept album Illinois. And what I liked so much about it was the fragile and expressive quality of Sufjan’s voice and his broad instrumentation, including the expected guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums but also oboe, banjo, trumpet, vibraphone, and things like that. I’m sorry to say that when I first asked a mentor about studying Sufjan’s vocal timbre, particularly the way he renders his vowels, they steered me away from the topic, saying that it was a linguistics project and not a music theory project.

Music theory as an area of research has become much more broad and inclusive.
But it’s difficult to reflect this in the classroom without resources.

So much has changed since then. I highly doubt that mentor would say the same thing today. Timbre studies have exploded since about 2015, and in the past couple years, voice in particular has been enjoying its moment. I just got a call for papers for an international conference called “New Perspectives on the Musical Analysis of the Voice,” for example.

[click] But oftentimes, the broad nature of our academic discipline is not reflected in the curriculum that we teach at our institutions, especially at the undergraduate level. Why is this? To be clear, I definitely don't think it's from a lack of desire to change. The reason I wanted to give this talk on this subject today is because I think people are ready and willing to change the undergraduate theory curriculum. But here's one potential roadblock: teachers are lacking practical and simple ways to add cutting-edge content in their classrooms when the topics are not covered in textbooks, workbooks, and standard theory pedagogy training. And while professional music theorists may have the resources to overcome this, we all know that it's not just tenure-track theory faculty teaching these courses, but also performance faculty, contingent faculty, and graduate students who are not supported enough to do this kind of labor. And there are more reasons to start teaching timbre beyond simply reflecting the field’s academic interests—I believe timbre can be a part of addressing broader shortcomings in music school curricula. In case you’ve been blissfully unaware of the prominent themes in current musicological discourse on this topic, I will quickly articulate what I see as the principal critiques that are relevant to my talk today.

Common critiques of theory and aural skills

Theory classes should discuss more than just classical music.
Theory classes spend too much time on form and (especially) pitch.
Theory classes alienate our students, and function as weeder classes that are gatekeeping certain people from studying music in an academic setting, to the detriment of our departments and our field.

Loren Kajikawa
“The Possessive Investment in Classical Music:
Confronting Legacies of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music"
(2019)

Motivations

Practical concerns about enrollment dips and budget
Ethical concerns about imperialism and exclusion

There's eminently practical concerns that can motivate these critiques. Most of our music programs have seen enrollment dips (because of Covid and budget cuts and general undervaluing of learning for learning sake—but that’s a whole other presentation). As programs realize they need to reach out to more people, they are reconsidering this exclusive focus on classical music. For example, we can’t assume all incoming freshmen have taken years of private lessons on their instruments, so programs may remove audition requirements altogether or add applied music technology as a primary instrument option. Programs may develop a music BA that is focused more on music studies than on performance. When programs do these sorts of things, it throws the traditional music theory curriculum into question. If students have not auditioned on an instrument, or don’t even play a traditional music school instrument, then we can no longer assume our students have spent years honing their ability to read notation. If a substantial chunk of your student population is majoring in music technology, music therapy, music business, or music studies, then classical music is unlikely to be relevant to their academic or career goals. A theory curriculum needs to be equipped to deal with this if the music department is going to stay afloat financially.

But there’s also a philosophical, ethical, moral concern that can spur the same critiques: the concern that theory is a colonizing force in music studies and music making. This struck me most when I read Dylan Robinson’s book, Hungry Listening, and Robin Attas’s work on decolonizing music curricula.

Robin Attas
“The Many Paths of Decolonization:
Exploring Colonizing and Decolonizing Analyses of
A Tribe Called Red’s ‘How I Feel’”
2022

Dylan Robinson
Hungry Listening:
Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies
2020

One thing that makes theory “colonizing” according to these authors is the way we break musical works down into component parts to study them out-of-time and in detail. While this seems ethically consistent with European classical music, for example—a culture can't colonize itself, as far as I know—there are other kinds of music in which this approach would be more ethically ambiguous or even clearly inappropriate. And if close analysis is what music theory is—and I think that’s often true—then honestly, I wonder if it's even possible for music theory to be decolonizing in any way. Certainly I’m not the best person to be reflecting on this, since my positionality as a white woman with the privilege of private piano lessons and traditional university music study means that I have a pretty substantial conflict of interest that I can’t pretend I am able to set aside. Like, I’m going to be pretty loath to admit that the subject I’ve essentially spent my entire life specializing in is now irrelevant and harmful to a 21st-century world. So bearing that big disclaimer in mind,

What can we do?

Appropriately circumscribe our work and recognize our positionality
Learn how to look at music in new and more holistic ways

I guess my take on it is that, even if music theorists can't be truly decolonizing in our work, we can at a minimum CLICK appropriately circumscribe our work—this is the music we can ethically address, and this is the music we cannot—and CLICK even better, we can learn from the literature and philosophy of decolonization how to look upon music in new ways. If we do that, not only would we do less harm, but we would also enrich our field.

One example of what I think of as a kind of colonizer’s outlook on music theory is when people who have only learned a little bit of music theory decide that they want to write music that emulates another style of music with which they’re not terribly familiar. This seems to be a common impulse among budding composers, especially nowadays in this era of musical omnivorousness.

I’m thinking in particular about the time I spent as a moderator of the music theory subreddit. There, I regularly saw posts from users who wanted help understanding how they could create an Arabic sound, or a psychedelic sound, or whatever. And their question would be “what scales do I use?” or “what chords do I use?”, because they were posting in a music theory subreddit for help, and they believed that music theory was based around scales and chords. The question is fundamentally flawed because really what makes these things sound like they are participating in those cultures or genres doesn't have very much to do with scales or chords. And now we’re getting to my pet projects, because in my opinion, emulating a style generally has more to do with timbre and instrumentation and texture.

Talk outline

Define timbre’s multifaceted nature
Suggest how different facets of timbre analysis would fit into different parts of an undergraduate music major curriculum
Offer practical resources for incorporating timbre study into your own curricula, based on my own experience and expertise

Five “Conceptions” of timbre

Stephen McAdams, “‘What Is Timbre?’ vs. ‘What Can We Do with Timbre?’: Picking the Right Questions” (2018)

Timbre as sound-source identification
Acoustics of timbre
Perceived timbre
Timbre semantics
Polyphonic timbre

Teaching timbre must first begin with defining it, and this is a notoriously tricky task. One of the most helpful definitions I’ve encountered comes from a presentation from Stephen McAdams, in which he enumerates five separate conceptions of timbre, as follows: - Timbre as sound-source identification, which talks about a kind of macrotimbre of each instrument—the “timbre” of a clarinet, for example. - Acoustics of timbre, which understands timbre as a physical and measurable phenomenon, like temperature. - Perceived timbre, that is, timbre as perceived in the mind of a listener. Perceived timbre is informed not just by the physical properties of the sound source but also by associations made in the listener’s mind. - Timbre semantics, which is focused on understanding and refining vocabularies of timbre. - Ensemble or polyphonic timbre; that is, consideration of the total timbre that arises from a combination of sound sources playing together. I'll go through each of these five conceptions in a little detail, because I think not everyone has thought through all that timbre really implies. And all of these five ways of understanding timbre are valuable scholarly fields of inquiry, but to what extent could they map onto the classes we offer undergraduate music majors? I’ll go through each.

Perceived timbre

Music perception and cognition
Cultural musicology

First, timbre as perceived. Many studies have evidenced the perceptual nature of timbral understanding. Our ears and our minds imperfectly assess acoustic information; we make critical judgments based on our prior knowledge and priorities, and so on. The role of timbre perception can be studied through two lenses: music perception and cognition and cultural musicology. Perception and cognition uses more quantitative methods to capture the way we think about timbre—for example, a listener might be given two sound samples and asked to evaluate how similar the sounds are timbrally. I think many music curricula don't incorporate this kind of empirical study into an undergraduate curriculum; of course, one that does could approach such a study of timbre in that class. Cultural musicology discusses timbre and its social contexts—the way our identities and background influence how we understand and experience timbre. For example, Nina Sun Eidsheim in *The Race of Sound* discusses how, while race and thus bodies may seem to be intelligible through vocal timbre alone, it is not inherent anatomical differences, but social differences—learned behaviors—that determine vocal timbre. To study timbre from this angle would feel most at home in a musicology or ethnomusicology course, where students are already primed to discuss society's impact on our experience of music.

Acoustics

Physical, "objective" facts about sound signals
The impact of materials, spaces, etc. on timbre

So while the complexity and malleability of timbre perception makes it feel very ineffable, there are also measurable components to timbre as well, and thus timbre can be discussed from this technical angle as well. Sound signals may be imported into spectrogram visualizers, for example, to allow an analyst to examine the physical, acoustic attributes of timbre. This is something I do in my own research, for example, on the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and in Sega Genesis sound. This kind of work overlaps nicely with music technology classes, and it wouldn’t be impossible to implement it in a typical theory or aural skills classroom. But I imagine the technological aspect may prove to be a roadblock in some contexts: there could be difficulty in getting all students fluent with the software, and that’s presuming they all would have access to the hardware they’d need.

Sound-source identification

Great for fundamentals and aural skills; important basis for later work too
Activity: identifying instruments by ear, with increasing precision and nuance

Timbre as sound-source identification is the most basic and essential kind of engagement with timbre. This is the part of timbre that is biological impulse and a survival skill. When we hear a sound we don’t expect, we ask ourselves, “what was that?” One time last summer, there was an extremely loud boom that rattled all the windows, and when I went outside to try to identify what had happened—did a tree fall down? was there a car crash? was that an earthquake?—I found all my neighbors outside doing the same thing and asking the same questions, and we were all on our phones, collaborating to try and satisfy our curiosity, Googling and texting geologist friends and checking Twitter. (This was back when Twitter was useful.) It turned out to have been a sonic boom caused by fighter jets flying overhead. But my point is that it’s a human instinct to categorize timbres based on their source sounds.

So given the primacy of this urge, sound-source identification seems like an appropriate skill to develop in aural skills classes and in theory fundamentals classes, and it would be a component of other discussions in higher-level coursework too. Activities could begin with simpler tasks, like distinguishing orchestral instruments from one another, but proceed to more subtle differences: telling a viola from a violin or cello, learning what different effects pedals do to an electric guitar sound, or identifying various auxiliary percussion instruments. I think this is one of the more straightforward conceptions of timbre with the clearest kinds of assessments, so this won’t be a focus for me today either, but sound-source identification is also an assumed skill for some of the activities I’ll discuss later in this talk.

Semantics

Great for written theory classes
Theory already spends a lot of time establishing vocabulary; this is a natural fit

Polyphonic Timbre

McAdams, Goodchild, and Soden, “A Taxonomy of Orchestral Grouping Effects Derived from Principles of Auditory Perception” (2022)

Analysis of texture: more than just “monophonic, polyphonic, homophonic”
Auditory stream analysis (ASA)

McAdams and his coauthors call polyphonic timbre “one of the most complex, mysterious, and dazzling aspects of music.” I agree, and I think that polyphonic timbre has some of the greatest power to pique our students’ curiosity about timbre.

A prerequisite to the study of polyphonic timbre is the study of texture and what’s called “auditory scene analysis,” both of which involve grouping instruments in a larger ensemble into component “streams” of aural information. Research has shown that treating ensemble timbre as a unified entity (for example, by analyzing a spectrogram from a mixed and mastered mono or stereo recording of an orchestral work) does not adequately reflect human experience of that ensemble performance, because listeners do not in fact experience this as a unified timbre, but rather as coordinated but separate timbres. This necessitates defining those smaller streams that a listener would attend to and evaluate separately. To be clear: analysis of texture is not the same as analysis of timbre, but the two are intertwined in this way—by analyzing texture, we can determine what entities constitute a single “timbre” in a given context. This kind of timbre analysis is a natural fit for most music theory classrooms.

With these grounding principles in mind, I’ll move now to the portion of my talk where I present some practical classroom resources, activities, and assessment structures that could begin to facilitate the inclusion of timbre analysis in our courses.

Textbooks and readings

Traditional textbooks don’t help much:

One (or one-half) chapter on texture/timbre
- Benward/Saker
  (“Texture and textural reduction”)
- Laitz
  (“Triads, Seventh Chords, and Texture”)
- Roig-Francoli
  (“The Rudiments of Harmony II: Labeling Chords. Musical Texture.”)

No chapters on texture/timbre
- Clendinning/Marvin
- Aldwell/Schachter
- Burstein/Straus
- Kostka/Payne/Almèn

But Open Educational Resources (OER) do!

Textbooks have a huge impact on curricula. While many of us who are professional, employed, full-time music theorists may feel comfortable developing our own materials based on scholarship we’ve read, many of us also work with people who need to rely on published or otherwise pre-existing material to teach their courses—for example, adjuncts who are not paid adequately and/or non-theorists often teach theory and aural skills classes. And the conventional textbooks focus on pitch and form. Of the seven common textbooks that make up 96% of the market share, only three include include a single chapter on texture, and two of them are still kind of about pitch, apparently (I didn’t actually look at the chapters). So the first thing I want to do is provide everyone with some excellent open educational resources (OER) that I’ve found that can support what I’m discussing today. Because they are free to access and use, you don’t have to drop your current curriculum wholesale to adopt these—they can augment your current text or curriculum without adding to your students’ costs.

Textbooks and readings

Tim Chenette, Foundations of Aural Skills

Textbooks and readings

ACTOR Network, Timbre and Orchestration Resource

Textbooks and readings

Mark Gotham, Open Music Theory v. 2, Orchestration

Textbooks and readings

Megan Lavengood, chapter on texture in pop music

(Chapters on auditory scene analysis and timbre vocabulary coming soon)

Activities and Assessments

Music theory loves visuals: annotated scores, form charts, musical geometries, dot grids/coffee-bean grids
How to visually represent and assess timbre analyses?

Polyphonic Timbre: Functional Layers

Layer graphs show entrance and exit of different layers of a musical work
E.g.: Butler (2006, background), Dolan (2013), Lavengood (2021)
Probably created with Excel or programming toolkits for data science

Analysts of timbre and texture have often created layer graphs that show the entrances and exits of a piece’s constituent instruments with the goal of illustrating the textural organization of a piece of music. Such graphs would be a good analogue for more familiar music-theoretical artifacts, like part-writing homework or form charts. Unfortunately, while dedicated music scholars may be able to craft these visual aids themselves, the average undergraduate music major likely does not have the time, the patience, and/or the software fluency to create a chart like this by formatting cells in Microsoft Excel or using a Python script to generate a Gantt chart (these are two methods I have used myself in the past).

To help address this issue, I am working with Brian Jarvis (a music theorist and capable Javascript programmer) and Evan Williams (a data scientist) to create a web app that would allow anyone to create a layer graph with relative ease.

Polyphonic Timbre: Functional Layers

Assignment: Identifying textural layers. Asks students to access “Going Somewhere” by Akaban on splitter.fm and assign each of the song‘s stems to a functional layer.
Assignment: Visualizing texture analysis.
Asks students to use Auralayer to map out the instrumentation and texture of “bad guy” by Billie Eilish (2019).

Polyphonic Timbre: Auditory Scene Analysis

grouping processes diagram

sequential grouping

Polyphonic Timbre: Auditory Scene Analysis

Assignment: Auditory scene analysis. Ask students to analyze a few passages from an orchestral work, annotate the score, and apply terminology from McAdams et al. 2022. For example:

Annotate the score to show all streams, color-coding to show which instruments integrate into a single stream.
For a given integrated stream, indicate what type of blend is occuring: timbral augmentation, timbral emergence, or timbral heterogeneity.
Find an example of auditory streams being integrated in a surface texture.
Find one example for three out of the five possible timbral contrasts.

Timbre Semantics

Assignment: Use aural analysis to apply terminology to provided sound samples. Possible sound samples: single orchestral instruments, synthesized sounds, unpitched percussion, famous vocalists, distorted guitar…
Class discussion or free response question on how identity/background may have influenced analysis.

What if it was normal for the theory curriculum to look this way?

thanks

↓ bibliography again ↓

Layers of Meaning:Teaching Instrumentation and Texture

Bibliography

Common critiques of theory and aural skills

Motivations

What can we do?

Talk outline

Five “Conceptions” of timbre

Perceived timbre

Acoustics

Sound-source identification

Semantics

Polyphonic Timbre

Textbooks and readings

Textbooks and readings

Textbooks and readings

Textbooks and readings

Textbooks and readings

Activities and Assessments

Polyphonic Timbre: Functional Layers

Polyphonic Timbre: Functional Layers

Polyphonic Timbre: Auditory Scene Analysis

Polyphonic Timbre: Auditory Scene Analysis

Timbre Semantics

Layers of Meaning:
Teaching Instrumentation and Texture