Music Listening, Music Therapy, Phenomenology and Neuroscience

5 – Microtemporal listening dimensions: Timbre, Harmony and Pitch height

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In music, differences of timbre permit the distinction of instruments,

voices and sound streams heard simultaneously, and differences between

timbral qualities can evoke spatial impressions of foreground and

background. Timbres may be heard as clearly separated simultaneous

layers, or they may merge in particular fused color qualities.

In the surrounding world, timbre is the listening dimension that enables

us to estimate the nature of sound sources and sounding objects, distin-

guish between them, recognize and identify them. The identification of

timbre answers the question, "What is it?". The simultaneous

question, "Where is it?", is answered by spatial

listening, enabling us to localize sound sources and sounding objects.

Together, timbre perception and spatial perception provide auditory

images of the variable relations between the listening mind and body and

the surrounding world.

Two kinds of auditory perception are simultaneously active in the brain.

One provides the basis for spatial discrimination, the other provides the

basis for object discrimination. Information about sounding objects and

information about spatial relations is processed simultaneously in two

parallel systems.

Jean-Claude Risset provides this description of the auditory potential for

spatial orientation;

The original function of hearing is not to extract the "parameters" of a

sounding signal, but rather to induce useful indications about the

environment from it. One would think that the evolution of hearing

has tended towards benefiting as much as possible from the proper-

ties of sound, which spreads at distance and winds round obstacles;

hearing plays an attentive role, it is particularly sensitive to changes,

and it has a tendency to eliminate the "background noises" from

consciousness - that is why an internal evolution, a spectral flux, is

necessary in order that a timbre be of interest. Hearing is equipped

with a well-developed mechanism permitting the evaluation of the

distance and direction of a sound source, and it possesses procedures

which help to maintain "the constancy of real things" (Koffka), just as

vision does not deduce the size of an object merely from the dimen-

sion of the image on the retina. (Risset, 1986)

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