Download Free The Oxford Handbook Of Timbre Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Oxford Handbook Of Timbre and write the review.

"With essays covering an array of topics including ancient Homeric texts, contemporary sound installations, violin mutes, birdsong, and cochlear implants, this volume reveals the richness of what it means to think and talk about timbre and the materiality of the experience of sound"--
Despite its importance as a central feature of musical sounds, timbre has rarely stood in the limelight. First defined in the eighteenth century, denigrated during the nineteenth, the concept of timbre came into its own during the twentieth century and its fascination with synthesizers and electronic music-or so the story goes. But in fact, timbre cuts across all the boundaries that make up musical thought-combining scientific and artistic approaches to music, material and philosophical aspects, and historical and theoretical perspectives. Timbre challenges us to fundamentally reorganize the way we think about music. The twenty-five essays that make up this collection offer a variety of engagements with music from the perspective of timbre. The boundaries are set as broad as possible: from ancient Homeric sounds to contemporary sound installations, from birdsong to cochlear implants, from Tuvan overtone singing to the tv show The Voice, from violin mutes to Moog synthesizers. What unifies the essays across this vast diversity is the material starting point of the sounding object. This focus on the listening experience is radical departure from the musical work that has traditionally dominated musical discourse since its academic inception in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Timbre remains a slippery concept that has continuously demanded more, be it more precise vocabulary, a more systematic theory, or more rigorous analysis. Rooted in the psychology of listening, timbre consistently resists pinning complete down. This collection of essays provides an invitation for further engagement with the range of fascinating questions that timbre opens up.
Music Theory operates with a number of fundamental terms that are rarely explored in detail. This book offers in-depth reflections on key concepts from a range of philosophical and critical approaches that reflect the diversity of the contemporary music theory landscape.
The second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology updates the original landmark text and provides a comprehensive review of the latest developments in this fast-growing area of research. Covering both experimental and theoretical perspectives, each of the 11 sections is edited by an internationally recognised authority in the area. The first ten parts present chapters that focus on specific areas of music psychology: the origins and functions of music; music perception, responses to music; music and the brain; musical development; learning musical skills; musical performance; composition and improvisation; the role of music in everyday life; and music therapy. In each part authors critically review the literature, highlight current issues and explore possibilities for the future. The final part examines how, in recent years, the study of music psychology has broadened to include a range of other disciplines. It considers the way that research has developed in relation to technological advances, and points the direction for further development in the field. With contributions from internationally recognised experts across 55 chapters, it is an essential resource for students and researchers in psychology and musicology.
Written by a team of experts and presenting the results of the most up-to-date research, The Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology will both stimulate and support further investigation into a society poised at the interface between prehistory and history.
Singing has been a characteristic behaviour of humanity across several millennia. Chorus America (2009) estimated that 42.6 million adults and children regularly sing in one of 270,000 choruses in the US, representing more than 1:5 households. Similarly, recent European-based data suggest that more than 37 million adults take part in group singing. The Oxford Handbook of Singing is a landmark text on this topic. It is a comprehensive resource for anyone who wishes to know more about the pluralistic nature of singing. In part, the narrative adopts a lifespan approach, pre-cradle to senescence, to illustrate that singing is a commonplace behaviour which is an essential characteristic of our humanity. In the overall design of the Handbook, the chapter contents have been clustered into eight main sections, embracing fifty-three chapters by seventy-two authors, drawn from across the world, with each chapter illustrating and illuminating a particular aspect of singing. Offering a multi-disciplinary perspective embracing the arts and humanities, physical, social and clinical sciences, the book will be valuable for a broad audience within those fields.
Whether social, cultural, or individual, the act of imagination always derives from a pre-existing context. For example, we can conjure an alien's scream from previously heard wildlife recordings or mentally rehearse a piece of music while waiting for a train. This process is no less true for the role of imagination in sonic events and artifacts. Many existing works on sonic imagination tend to discuss musical imagination through terms like compositional creativity or performance technique. In this two-volume Handbook, contributors shift the focus of imagination away from the visual by addressing the topic of sonic imagination and expanding the field beyond musical compositional creativity and performance technique into other aural arenas where the imagination holds similar power. Topics covered include auditory imagery and the neurology of sonic imagination; aural hallucination and illusion; use of metaphor in the recording studio; the projection of acoustic imagination in architectural design; and the design of sound artifacts for cinema and computer games.
Music Theory has a lot of ground to cover. Especially in introductory classes a whole range of fundamental concepts are introduced at fast pace that can never be explored in depth or detail, as other new topics become more pressing. The short time we spend with them in the classroom belies the complexity (and, in many cases, the contradictions) underlying these concepts. This book takes the time to tarry over these complexities, probe the philosophical assumptions on which these concepts rest, and shine a light on all their iridescent facets. This book presents music-theoretical concepts as a register of key terms progressing outwards from smallest detail to discussions of the music-theoretical project on the largest scale. The approaches individual authors take range from philosophical, historical, or analytical to systematic, cognitive, and critical-theorical-covering the whole diverse spectrum of contemporary music theory. In some cases authors explore concepts that have not yet been widely added to the theorist's toolkit but deserve to be included; in other cases concepts are expanded beyond their core repertory of application. This collection does not shy away from controversy. Taken in their entirety, the essays underline that music theory is on the move, exploring new questions, new repertories, and new approaches. This collection is an invitation to take stock of music theory in the early twenty-first century, to look back and to encourage discussion about its future directions. Its chapters open up a panoramic view of the contemporary music-theoretical landscape with its expanding repertories and changing guiding questions, and offers suggestions as to where music theory is headed in years to come.
More than 200 years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices that speak from any- and everywhere. We interact daily with voices that emit from house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home. However, vocal events still have the capacity to raise age-old questions about the human, the animal, the machine, and the spiritual-or in non-metaphysical terms-questions about identity and authenticity. In The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, contributors look to the metaphorical voice as well as the clinical understanding of the vocal apparatus to answer the seemingly innocuous question: What is voice? From a range of disciplines including the humanities, biology, culture, and technology studies, contributors draw on the unique methodologies and values each has at hand to address the uses, meanings, practices, theories, methods, and sounds of the voice. Together, they assess the ways that discipline-specific, ontological, and epistemological assumptions of voice need to shift in order to take the findings of other fields into account. This Handbook thus enables a lively discussion as multifaceted and complex as the voice itself has proven to be.
Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge explores how timbre shapes musical affect and meaning. Integrating perspectives from musicology with the cognitive sciences, author Zachary Wallmark advances a novel model of timbre interpretation that takes into account the bodily, sensorimotor dynamics of sound production and perception. The contribution of timbre to musical experience is clearest in drastic situations where meaning is itself contested; that is, in polarizing contexts of reception where evaluation of musical timbre by some listeners collides headlong against a competing claim-that it is just noise. Taking this ubiquitous moment as a starting point, the book explores affect, reception, and timbre semantics through diverse cultural-historical case studies that frustrate the acoustic and perceptual boundary between musical sound and noise. Nothing but Noise includes chapters on the racial and gender politics in the reception of free jazz saxophone screaming in the late 1960s; an analysis of contested timbral ideals in the performance practices of the Japanese shakuhachi flute; and an historical examination of the overlooked role of brutal timbres in the moral panic over heavy metal in the eighties and nineties. The book closes with a discussion of the slippery social fault lines separating perceptions of musical sound from noise and the ethical stakes of encountering another's aural face.