Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge

Abstract

zachary wallmark's nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge appears at a moment when the emerging movement of “timbre studies” might be ready to drop the quotation marks and become an established musicological subdiscipline. As Wallmark recounts in his introduction (7), the past decade has seen a constant growth of timbre-oriented publications in Anglo-American musicology and music theory, from scholars such as Cornelia Fales, Nina Sun Eidsheim, and Stephen McAdams. Just last year, The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, edited by Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding (2021), received the Ruth A. Solie Award for “a collection of musicological essays of exceptional merit,” a distinction that, tellingly, was also bestowed on another collection of essays on timbre, The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (2018), edited by Robert Fink, Melinda Latour, and Wallmark himself. Nothing but Noise, the first monograph of a scholar who has trained and collaborated with the leading names in this new subdiscipline, arrives with high expectations. It meets them in both form and content, but also leaves open important questions that have the potential to shape the field in coming years.The introduction to Nothing but Noise is a helpful guide to the development of timbre studies and its leading challenges, which range from a well-acknowledged lack of clear definitions and technical vocabulary—a lack that is productively compensated in this volume—through the difficulties involved in separating timbre from other musical parameters (which, Wallmark argues, can be done experimentally in the lab but ultimately remains an analytic distinction [186]), to its main epistemological problematic: whether timbre is an empirical phenomenon that exists “out there” in the physical world or an individual or cultural experience irreducible to physical measurements. Wallmark parses these approaches according to what he terms “the Great Binarism,” divided between small-t timbre—defined as “a material phenomenon that, like all physical stuff, is subject to scientific observation, measurement, and statistical inference”—and capital-T Timbre, denoting “a kind of ineffable thing-in-itself, invisible to empirical inquiry and approachable only through culture-theoretical, psychoanalytical, and philosophical (mainly continental and postmodern) lenses” (12).As Wallmark emphasizes, the gap that separates these approaches goes beyond disciplinary distinctions between the empirical sciences and the humanities—since timbre studies has been a necessarily interdisciplinary affair from the beginning. To bridge this gap, Wallmark introduces the “ASPECS” model, a “vertically integrated structure” that seeks to link the empiricist's small-t timbre (act, sound, perception) with its capital-t counterpart (experience, concept, sign). Having also attempted to sketch an alternative to timbral binarisms (Villegas Vélez 2021), I find Wallmark's approach to be an economic and productive avenue to overcome them, although a tension remains latent, as I suggest below.The book is organized in three cleverly named parts: a substantial introduction is followed by “Part 1. Fundamental,” composed of two theoretical chapters that advance the main claims of the book: that timbre is better understood in relation to its bodily experience, and that such affective feelings are later mediated by “conceptual metaphors”— metaphorical image schemata that draw on bodily experience as fundamental structures for abstract thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). These chapters draw extensively on the literature on embodied cognition, supplemented by experiments carried out in Wallmark's lab to bring a specific focus on timbre.“Part 2. Spectrum” contains three chapters that serve as case studies that test and enlarge the theoretical framework developed in part 1, focusing on the reception of free-jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, the cultural tensions between differing schools of Shakuhachi performance presented from an “insider's perspective” (Wallmark himself is an accomplished Shakuhachi player), and the collective panic around heavy metal and its subgenres in the 1990s. Each chapter samples from competing interpretations of vocal and instrumental timbres that are perceived as noisy, drawing on various theoretical sources to flesh out the nature of these perceived divergences. These are rich and nuanced close readings of the music that might serve as models for timbral analysis, combining spectrograms, detailed contextual descriptions of the acoustic and organological aspects, and embedded audio examples to expose the richness of his examples.1 In particular, the formal analysis of the opening track in Coltrane's Meditations (1965) demonstrates the effectiveness of timbre-based analysis for repertories that resist more traditional, pitch-based approaches (98–102). The main argument throughout these chapters is that noisy timbres generate excessive demands on the listening body that demand a response. Yet, following Eidsheim (2019), Wallmark emphasizes that despite the physical identity of noisy timbre (small-t), there are always competing interpretations of Timbre that reveal more of the listener than they do of the sound-emitting source, so that judgments about timbre are always compromised by subject positionalities such as race, class, and gender, which he analyzes at length (110).A central concern in timbre studies, also given prominence by the work of Eidsheim in particular, is the problematic role that timbre plays as a mediator and marker of racial difference. The final section, “Part 3. Resonances,” contains one single chapter (“6. The Aural Face”), which examines three such cases in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the systematization of timbre's mediating role in Alan Lomax's Cantometrics Project (1950–80), where timbre “is mapped onto social structures” (181). Through these examples, Wallmark examines the possibility of an “ethics of timbre-centered listening” (184) that takes account of timbre's significance with respect to its seemingly immediate impact on the body and of its social inscription. Here Wallmark poses a corrective to Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of alterity, in which “the aural face of timbre occupies a singularly potent and problematic position in the generation of musical meaning, and hence in the ethics of musical exchange and encounter. It's the gatekeeper to empathy” (187). I will return to this unexpected and perhaps aporetic conclusion, that timbre emerges as an obstacle and not an avenue for musical empathy.Wallmark's main contribution to the “nascent conversation” (8) of timbre studies is his “embodied theory of musical timbre” (32). Wallmark's linkage of Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) “conceptual metaphors” with “mirror neurons”—which are believed to react immediately in imitation of perceived action—is a productive application of Arnie Cox's mimetic hypothesis (2016) to timbral aspects, which are largely absent from Cox's current work. For Cox, mirror neurons produce autonomic responses to external action in two ways: either through physical action, known in the literature as “overt imitation,” or motor mimetic action, or through the internal imaging of the same actions, called “covert imitation,” or mimetic motor imagery (Cox 2016: 38). According to this hypothesis, there is no perception of musical events that is not accompanied, indeed underpinned by, either of these two modes of autonomic bodily reaction. To make musical sense is always to “perform” the music ourselves.Since the timbre of acoustic instruments is a byproduct of motor exertion (which synthesized timbres evoke), Wallmark suggests that perceived timbre is similarly “action-oriented,” namely, a mimetic response exercised in terms of bodily actions, in particular through perceived similarities with vocal expression, which are implicitly felt through subvocalization (mimetic motor imagery). In other words, we parse and evaluate diverse timbres according to how it would feel to produce such sounds with our own vocal apparatus, and this occurs at an autonomic level that rarely registers consciously (32). Wallmark draws on William James's (1950) affect theory and Antonio Damasio's (2000) somatic marker hypothesis to theorize how these autonomic responses undergo a process of “appraisal” over a binary valence scale from positive to negative—pleasure to pain—according to an evolutionary adaptive response to external influences as beneficial or dangerous to the organism (35). This model is especially well adapted to Wallmark's emphasis on “noisy” timbres such as the overexerted voice of Brandi Carlile, Coltrane's “saxophonic scream,” and the guttural singing techniques of death metal; and his close readings flesh out its various implications.As Wallmark himself notes, the idea that vocal timbre serves as a paradigm for musical affect is not new. Indeed, the first scale of timbral appraisal, found in Rousseau's (1998: 468) entry for the Encyclopédie, is explicitly cast according to what Dolan (2013: 59) calls “the standard of the singing voice,” which valorizes the timbre of various instruments according to their resemblance to the human voice. Wayne Slawson's (1985) model draws on the timbral structure of vowel sounds to generate an analytical system with compositional applications. Closer to Wallmark's approach, Kate Heidemann (2016) draws from the same conceptual apparatus of embodied cognition and Cox's mimetic hypothesis to provide a cogent and detailed system for relating the meaning of timbre to vocal performance in popular music. Drawing on Herbert Spencer's 1857 essay, “The Origin and Function of Music” for its explicit link between embodied emotions, the voice, and musical expression, Wallmark suggests a relation between emotion, bodily exertion, and the production of “noisy” timbres, defined as “pitched sounds with spectral and temporal elements characteristic of high-arousal vocalization that deviate from a specific situationally defined default norm of sound production” (40). In the context of Western music, Wallmark notes, noisy timbres are characterized by high-frequency energy, strength in inharmonic partials, and sensory dissonance or beating. High-arousal vocalizations exhibit these same characteristics as a result of an overstressed vocal system, high-frequency energy or timbral brightness, and inharmonicity, qualities that also transfer to instrumental sounds. Hence, hearing a noisy timbre—whether vocal or instrumental—generates a covert or overt affective response in the body that mirrors the perceived exertion involved in producing such timbres, even if, crucially, no actual effort is necessary to produce them, as in the case of special vocal techniques, distortion pedals, or otherwise synthesized sounds.Wallmark's fundamental insight is that there is an immediate affective response to timbre that corresponds in valence to the type of exertion required to produce them. A “clean” vocal sound—Carlile's “The Story” serves as Wallmark's first case study—conveys a different musical meaning than a voice that is overexerted does, so that when Carlile's voice adopts an “overstrained, torn-up scream-singing,” her pain becomes “not just metaphorical—it literally sounds painful to produce” (45) in a way that complements and recasts the meaning conveyed by the song's lyrical content. The same argument is made of Coltrane's “saxophonic scream” (104) and the guttural sound of death metal outfits such as Cannibal Corpse (155). The important point, developed at length in Wallmark's analyses, is that these immediate, autonomic reactions to noisy timbres do not exclusively determine how the saxophonic scream or the “brutal” growl of death metal singers will be experienced and conceptualized in diverse cultural contexts. In these cases, the same noisy timbre generates “an interplay between visceral reactions and culturally situated appraisals” (98). Coltrane's repertory of extended techniques in the late 1960s was perceived either as a form of spiritual transcendence and the cry of the civil rights movement, or as an aesthetic dead end, an “assault on the ears,” and even a death threat to the white man (113). As Wallmark puts it, Coltrane's foray into timbral excess served as “a Rorschach test to listeners in the turbulent mid 1960s, and arguably still does today” (113), a conclusion that might apply, mutatis mutandis, to his other case studies. Noisy timbres, according to this reading, are like the inkblots of projective psychological tests—meaningless surfaces on which listeners might project their emotions. Yet the simile has the unfortunate effect of blurring over the careful work done in previous chapters to precisely account for how noisy timbres effectively generate emotional responses through complex psychosomatic mechanisms, something that cannot be said of the stereotypical use of Rorschach tests.I highlight this formulation since it captures a tension that traverses, indeed structures, the entire book in a way that challenges the reader, a tension or indecision between the empiricist's “we are evolutionarily hardwired for x” and the cultural theorist's “everything is constructed.” In both cases, the rich nuance of timbre risks getting dispersed amid biological mechanisms, individual predilections, or social constructs. The point, of course, is not to pick sides between these admittedly reductive formulations but to meaningfully articulate the two positions, to bridge the gap across the great divide that Wallmark has set out to accomplish. In my judgment, Wallmark's argument is as cogent as possible with regard to the empiricist side, the sound-perception-experience section of the ASPECS model, in that it draws from a solid body of research that has been well received in the music theory community, notably that of Lakoff and Johnson 1980, which is convincingly supplemented by Wallmark's lab experiments and analyses in the volume. With regard to Cox's mimetic hypothesis, the reader must keep in mind that it is precisely a hypothesis, an interpretive framework that draws from cutting-edge neurobiological research with as-yet inconclusive results, since the inner workings of the mirror neurons that underlie the entire system are not currently well understood.2But if mirror neurons are “new,” the notion of mimesis is anything but—indeed, it has arguably gone hand in hand with music theory since Plato's Republic, where it served precisely as a mechanism to account for the relation between musical entities (including timbre) and the contagious qualities of human emotions. Mimesis has been a central concept in musically oriented critical thought from Nietzsche to Adorno to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, where it often serves the function of, precisely, mediating between the natural and the cultural. We know well that humans are imitative animals; how and why they are so is less clear. An important insight from the history of humanist reflection on mimesis, expressed by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida among others, however, is that we must be attentive neither to reduce mimesis to resemblance nor to interpret iconic similarity and repetition as processes that add nothing to its presumed models or originals. This insight poses some complications for the straightforward version of the mimetic hypothesis and any work that mobilizes it. The challenge is not so much showing that we imitate (overtly or covertly), but rather it is discovering what the mechanisms are that transform these autonomic responses into felt emotion, cognitive judgments, and iterable “timbral signs,” in terms that go beyond the scale of appraisal (which only offers a limited binary framework between the supporters and detractors of a given musical style). For this, the so-called humanist side is rich in resources for future research.It is at this point that the close readings of conflicting receptions in the repertories analyzed by Wallmark are critical, yet most of the time the implied conclusion is that listeners judge a sound according to preconceptions that align with their sociopolitical orientations, that the appraisal is “contingent upon how the individual listener (or community of listeners)” chooses to hear a given timbre (114). While Wallmark convincingly demonstrates that these sounds demand a response from listeners, the nontrivial reason that listeners respond in one way or another (or otherwise remain indifferent) is less clear. Although Wallmark discusses the issue of virtuosity (and its rejection) in his chapter on the Shakuhachi, this perspective was particularly in this arguably the most important aesthetic for of and heavy timbres are the result of often technical that their noisy aural and which are conveyed through bodily In these cases, is not in evolutionary but as of the framework of conceptual which Wallmark a of the at an abstract yet it to the gap between affective autonomic responses and individual are not as of a book that is rich in about both empirical and humanist approaches to timbre, but rather to in on the challenges of the emerging In particular, there remains a in Wallmark's conclusion the ethics of the aural that timbre is a problematic to empathy” (187). that Wallmark to be a for any as I the conclusion in the context of the argument of the book: that timbre bodily mimetic mechanisms of that, to the timbres around them, it might be said that the same becomes the It is the and of timbre that lab experiments suggest that listeners are to to how much the listener with the music and the with this as as one The that and social to be largely so that at with who like the same music not with who As presented in the book and in its form in Wallmark's (Wallmark this only to the link between musical and perceived social identity that to but it a to make this particular, even into the of a musical concern with the of timbral perception might be better by his own that, at the moment when first music and her and with respect to their of there was a of notion of As Wallmark in the conclusion to the how effectively the embodied in yet than in from her to the demand of the other by this meaning and even I would suggest that this case what is at in any timbral that is involved in to from the of timbral affect to its as the last two in the ASPECS This gap would to account for the excess of affective timbre, not of the ineffable nature of the musical but rather of the gap that separates the from and immediate, affective perception from its appraisal in In the end, “timbral is from the timbral and its bodily experience, even if we as if these This gap would perhaps the in between listeners, and would that the immediate would on and not on the of the which would remain to according to is just the of experience in Wallmark's and of timbres, noisy and to better just how these are of experience, that is to of any that we in as embodied

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