Title
II
Magic rattle, human harp
The vibrating note travels. It des not remain in its place, as colour
does. True, colour is likewise emitted to catch the attention, but then
it stays put. For a white to detach itself from a garment, or a wall, is
unthinkable. In contrast, the whole of the surrounding air can be full
o f a sound.
There was a time when the musical note did not appear such a free
agent. It was linked quite specifically with the instrument producing
it. When first consciously produced, it was wholly attached to its
instrument and had no other association. Thus the original rattle
rattled as the thing it was; the rattling sound is merely its verb, as it
were. The thunder-stick whirred and the drum beat itself: that was
the main thing. Thus here the sound is an attribute of the instrument,
to which it is linked in a purely material sense. Its sonorousness is
used for magical purposes, for healing the sick, driving away evil
spirits and summoning good ones. But it is not primarily the sound
which performs the spell, but the actual magic drum being used. The
crucial element is the sacred instrument, as ancient as possible,
specially painted or with special incisions. At the most it is through
the power o f rhythm, in the dance, that music as such becomes more
advanced, itself exerting an immediate influence. Yet, even now, the
drum will fascinate by being hollow, subterranean, the cymbal by
being metallic.
The more the musical note developed, the more it parted from this
foundation. It surmounted its instrument, so to speak, and now used
it as merely a means o f assistance. Now the ringing and tinkling
broke loose from the ringing brass and the tinkling bell; musicians no
longer just attended on their instruments but availed themselves of
them. This change is marked by the invention of the pan-pipe: the
first instrument which did not emit fearsome or muffled sounds in
isolation but gave out a well-ordered series o f notes. It is at this point
that music is born, music as a shout of sorrow or pleasure and not as
material magically sounding. No longer do we hear the speech o f the
wood or metal, but neither do we discern the soul of a flute or horn.
140
MAGIC RATTLE, HUMAN HARP
Instead the miracle of music is now itself triumphant in every quar-
ter. Previously the tricking out o f the rattle with bird feathers
charged with spirits, and o f drums with magical incisions, was at
least as important as the frightening or alluring sound that they
made; but now, this faith in the material thing disappears completely
from the musical viewpoint. On a miniature scale, the rattles, drums
and thunder-sticks had even been worn as lucky charms, but not the
pan-pipe, which was unconsecrated. The rattling field o f the instru
ment yields to the opening up of the auditory field, in which music
had not until now, after its deliverance from the magic o f the material
thing, made its home. T o be sure, the compass, technique and
expression o f the instruments are and remain of importance, for
it is only with amateurs that the instrumentation is a secondary con-
sideration, or even interchangeable. But even where,. desper ate
attempts were made to bind the exodus o f music tcfthe knownFealm^
a magicking of the instruments or f i j i F u r ^ in
this od style was absent. It is not the tinkling bell but^Ke tinkle itself JjA
that now emerges from(materal^leprived o f itsmagic} And in the
process, the material can Tounder completely in the covered
orchestra^The musical note evinced much vigour in turning from the
attribute o f a thing intojthe yery thing that matters, i n a developed
State; from an adjective into a substantive; from ag^YtulToug)
excrescence of objects that were rubbed, struck or blown nfo^mnH
versal, t h o u g h ) ^ ^ ^ l!k t tis t ic ^ a ln ^ with melodic and above all
human relations o f its own!/%usih which to start with only denoted
a piece o f wood that men shook or sacred implements for their hear-
ing, furthermore became, over and beyond its physical character, a
colossal realm whgse.,qbjective nature was still largely unknowru/If
one were bent on^demonstfathg an objectfor it in the known realm,
one no longer referred to sacred instruments, even in the context o f
magic objects. Rather, notes and their scales were related to whole
constellations, to the harmony of the spheres, to the Lyra Apollinis
that was supposed to stretch across the seven known planets. But
even here, the actual melodies were still floating through space, not
located or indeed incarnated in some existing object. Even so-called
tone painting describing rain or thunderstorms, where it possesses
any musical merit, registers only the psychomorphous action of rain
falling, a storm erupting, daybreak or nightfall, without having
localised such events in a concrete sense. And as for the Lyra
Apollinis, the harmony of the spheres as echoed in the scales and
ffe ie o i l m
> i A
Q Ut f/
3 {/(
A
h
t ( >
141
MAGIC RATTLE, HUMAN HARP
‘ harmony of music (% mperstitior^ which persisted from the time of
the Pythagoreans up to Kepler and indeed Buxtehude), musics real
development has confounded all such natural, indeed astronomi-
cal, object-definitions. W hy, even in the much more genuine realm of
human object-relations, music still travels under top-secret orders.
And assuredly these contain no references, directly or primarily, to
an origin linked with material things and the magic o f things.
There are nonetheless, amid the fluctuations, some noteworthy
remains. Sounds ability to be everywhere and nowhere has asserted
its claim, yet it is not necessarily lacking in the instrumental where
which bound it to start with. In the first place this is still conveyed by
the fact that trumpets are associated with kings and trombones are
associated with priests. Trumpets which proclaim that kings are
approaching – what we have here is not just convention or external
historical association. On the contrary, the trumpet and the trom-
bone are themselves standing for monarchic or sacerdotal might,
alm ost irrespective o f w hat they are playing. Granted, the trumpet
has ceased to be a sonorous fetish, yet neither is it just the attribute of
a king, since it resounds as the actual r o ja l splendour which this king
is projecting. And secondly, instruments portrayed as having their
own magic still occur on the stage, in magic operas; here they are por
trayed with great forcefulness, even. W ith their diabolical clattering
in the orchestra, Dr M iracles tinkling phials in T he Tales o f
H offm ann belong to this category. They make a light, glassy sound
compared to the D o ctors roaring and shrieking, but one that is
equally spellbinding. Directly(archatc> on the brighter side of the
coin – are the horn which plays in O beron , Papagenos bells in The
M agic Flute and the magic flute itself, carved by Paminas father
from the very base of the thousand-year-old oak, by thunder and
lightning, gale and tempest. And once again it is not just their
melody which casts a spell, but the fetish to which it is given. In Dr
M iracles case the flute of the Pied Piper is suggested, and in
Tam inos the zither playing o f Arion and Amphion, not only in
respect o f their great artistry but in respect o f the magic instrument
in each case as well. Ultimately, to be sure, this element o f the magic
object appears to be only a surrogate for the supreme concentration
o f music at a crucial point in the action, viz. a point effecting some
transformation. Takeftf^ nuhp^^^nm y-scarcely still remembered
in terms of ^ m a g ic’D h je ^ which, purly as melody, echoes down
into Florestans dungeoTin Beethovens Fidelio. At that stage the
142
MAGIC RATTLE, HUMAN HARP
trumpet is almost completely forsaken, and in it we hear solely the
M inisters voice or the realm o f salvation which has suckled
music since it first became Christian. But even the archaic enclaves
which preceded it (in Papagenos bells, in Tam inos flute) no longer
qualify as vestigial proofs o f ancient magic instruments. They fail to
do so at all in terms o f the philosophy o f musical metal, and they
barely qualify in terms o f the gnostic-celestial instrumental sym-
bolism that Abert rediscovered in his book, M usikanschauung des
Mittelalters. It is not the paucity o f the remains that contradicts the
pagan interpretation o f music in the context of magic objects (for
the remains are nonetheless lodged in a high, if not the highest,
musical authority). But even f a consecrated. befll which is another
revealing remnant, rings not from the depjh o f the metal but down
from aloft; essentially it is within the church tower that the metal
thus dedicated is hanging and operative.|ln an orchestra, jh e belPs
metal mouth is, rather a subject for ridicule. Indeed, even music
whose im is black magic (like Stravinskys Rite ofSpring) derives its
instrumented gruesomeness only incidentally from the clanging
brass or resonant bell. . .
W e are now coming to the actual purpose o f our enquiry. For all
this harking back brings us to the singer, the problem o f the singer
himself, especially in opera; he is the remnant which shows the most
life. The singer really still is a beating drum, or rather, a harp that
plays its own music. Here in contrast to those previous remnants
which were rarely found and faintly bizarre, though important the
musical note has a definite site, namely a body that sings in the ‘
cess o f acting. Here music, in the process o f floating, alights onxa
visible instrumental provenance; it thereby adheres at the same tim
to other visible objects and denotes them. By means o f t h e singer, the ]
melismatic and even the symphonic elusiveness of music finds itself
placed in an operatic scene and the action which this localises. In solo
song and in oratorio.E eliu m an voice isju st an instrument like other 3
instruments, and the singer just a mildly stressed vehice for the
n^sidC’But as for opera, this is not only a place where tKehm han
voice will not cause an obstruction. Here and not just to further the
expansin of human song it is a form of dramatic action which is
necessary and supremely justified in a specifically musical context.
And in using singers.it puts instruments on the sta^e that ^ phys.i-
cally active and significant once more: not sacred instruments, but
ones^wtKa natural emphasis. Here w e have on the stage a Ttind o f
143
MAGIC RATTLE, HUMAN HARP
human harp. This instruments voice signifies purely the instrument
itself; only on a secondary level do its actions signify the instrumen-
tally detached musical content. Certainly the origins o f opera are not
archaic in the aforesaid sense. Yet the opera singer is distinctly in
touch with the archaic remains, with music as the attribute of an
object set in motion and emitting its own sound. Although this
parallel may seem an odd one, it is one o f the facts of music and has
proved to be effective in practice. Aprt from the music within whose
fabric they are found, soprano and alto, tenor, baritone and bass do
in fact attend on the instrument which they represent and with
which thy are linked through a personal bond. Henee the associ-
ation of individual vocal categories, i.e. individual instruments in
the vocal deprtrnent, with specific natural qualities o f the m ale r
fem ale ch a ra ctersc o rresponding to them ispartly extra-musical and,
indeed, pre-musical. Here music is not formallylfserf-suFfcient|at all.
or does it articlate in an expressive role as still applies in the solo
song suffering, longing, anger or love in general, to cite Schopen-
hauers abstract and too emancipated interpretation. Rather, it is
now the case that music is attached to the material o f its instruments,
being the sound and speech o f this very material. In the role of
soprano or bass, it renders the soul of the natural condition which
thus sings o f itself|A nqteqnthe recorder will never revea!, thew opd,
,and a trumpet note..will neyer. reveal the souP of the metal, whereas
in the cas offthe lyrica instrument o f th e body^ the voice is also
manifested as a revelanon of its soprano, lto, tenor or bass character
there on the stage. And the associations change in accordance with
the way an age views th charctefs of voices. W ith M ozart the
tenor, for instance, representeS a rather gentle cantabile quality:
Tam ino has it, as does the less powerful Ottavio. The baritone voice,
in contrast, represents the very condition o f Don Giovanni, the
actual hero o f an amorous intrigue, as well as the condition of Count
Almaviva. Even Figaros own bass voice is readily reconciled with
Susanna the soubrette, whose youth he shares. But when ideas
changed in the nineteenth century, the tenor carne to the fore. With
Verdi, and more victoriously still with Wagner, he became the
aurum p o ta b ile of youth and erotic power heroic power in fact.
Blond hair, a sunny radiance, strange white gods and their fetishes
were now the prestige, as it were, o f the tenor instruments, the way
they looked, and they had a character not previously associated with
them. Today, this heroic resolve is fading again. The baritone is
144
MAGIC RATTLE, HUMAN HARP
regaining ground once more as the instrumental sound o f masculine
vigour, minus all cello-like smoothness, bland benevolenee or
acquiescence. This matches our aversin to a high imperious voice
expanding in song – even if the actors ame is Radames. But none of
these changes would have occurred had it not been for the singers
representation o f himself, which affords a lover of operatic voices the
presence o f a distinct vocal object. Here the instruments association
with a character revealingly arrests, at any rate, the elusiveness which
music, even non-Rom antic music, still normally possesses. For vocal
trumpets, unlike the ones that you blow, really are kings. Indeed
W alther Stolzings high trumpet, which is a sheer paean to himself,
almost finishes even without the m elos by transforming the
awakened Mastersingers into a love nests attendant spirits. W hat
has replaced the archaic magic of the object, to some extent at least,
is a kind o f intrinsic magic o f the material, the singing love-poetry or
the instrumental live mpetus of an especially effusive display o f the
material itself, which is localised. T o be sure it is also this, for its own
part, which enables opera music to have its issue in a human world
portrayed on the stage and to transform the pan-pipe, or the harp,
into actors; these, however, now voice human m aterial. They are
serving the music above them – with the limiting ideal o f the entire
theatre itself as a magic flute. ,
145 The Paradox of Timbre
Author(s): Cornelia Fales
Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Winter, 2002), pp. 56-95
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/852808
Accessed: 30-01-2019 20:12 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [emailprotected]
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
University of Illinois Press, Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR
to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Wed, 30 Jan 2019 20:12:33 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
VOL. 46, No. 1 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY WINTER 2002
The Paradox of Timbre
CORNELIA FALES / University of California, Santa Barbara
Introduction
n 1950, Alan Merriam toured the Belgian Congo and Trust Territory of
Ruanda-Urundi to record music representing various ethnic groups of the
region. Among the 67 reels of tape that resulted are the earliest recordings
of Burundi Whispered Inanga or Inanga Cbucbotde, a genre of which only
one other substantial collection exists and few performers remain. For this,
Merriam’s tapes are priceless; but they are also memorable as an example
of how the simple act of recording immortalizes a notion of music that may
reflect the researcher more than the musicians represented.
Inanga Chuchotee consists of a whispered text, accompanied by the
inanga, a trough zither of eight strings. As is often the case with African
music, the Barundi assign primary importance to the vocal text, though its
real significance according to musicians, lies not so much in its meaning,
but in the whisper that articulates it and particularly in the effect of the
combined timbres of the noisy whisper and the inanga. Merriam’s tapes,
however, show a consistent tendency to position the microphone so close
to the inanga, that the text is often muffled and inaudible. It is difficult to
escape the conclusion that Merriam was more interested in virtuosic inan-
ga playing-in the accompaniment, that is-than he was in the whispered
vocals by which the Barundi define the genre.
In obscuring the central effect of Whispered Inanga, Merriam’s record-
ings of the music betray the subtle bias of what has come to be called “pitch-
centrism” or “timbre deafness,” a perceptual proclivity on the part of west-
ern listeners, including ethnomusicologists, to focus on melody in music
where the dominant parameter is timbre. Listeners from a culture where
pitch is governed by law while timbre is governed by taste, where musical
execution is judged correct or incorrect according to variations in pitch,
while variations in other parameters of music are judged pleasing or dis-
pleasing’-such listeners would be surprised and perhaps disoriented to
? 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
56
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Wed, 30 Jan 2019 20:12:33 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Fales: The Paradox of Timbre 57
find the opposite polarity in evaluations of Whispered Inanga. A perfor-
mance of Inanga is judged incorrect if the expected timbral effect is impre-
cisely executed, whereas wide deviations in pitch are considered ornamen-
tal, expressive or, if unsuccessful, in bad taste or inappropriate. Especially
in a genre where the instrument, inanga, retains its tuning with difficulty,
where the whispering voice is pitchless, and where the meter changes
according to patterns of long and short syllables in the text, timbre is the
single element that is a fairly stable and predictable standard of correctness.
I will return to Whispered Inanga later.
Timbre
In the last fifteen years, the citing of timbre as an important feature of
African music has taken on the same aura of banal truth that once charac-
terized the association of rhythm and African music. Both associations are
true for a great deal of African music, but unlike rhythm which continues
to attract scholarly attention, the role of timbre even now is often no sooner
mentioned than forgotten.2 As scholars, indeed as listeners, we have a
difficult time describing timbre. Though we can talk about it in large gen-
eralities, as though it were a conceptual abstraction–“timbre is important
to African music, community is important to African music”–it is only by
deliberate effort that we conceptualize it as a distinctly ongoing, dynamic
feature of music with the same clarity as pitch or meter. So to describe
Merriam’s misinterpretation of the Whispered Inanga aesthetic as timbre
deafness is imprecise. We have a peculiar amnesia3 in regard to timbre, but
we’re not deaf to timbre: we hear it, we use it-no one has much trouble
telling instruments apart-but we have no language to describe it.4 With
no domain-specific adjectives, timbre must be described in metaphor or by
analogy to other senses, and this is true in many, many languages of the
world.
Through the study of timbre runs a sort of paradox that I will summa-
rize here briefly before embarking on the more detailed discussion to fol-
low. One of the objectives of hearing, as of all the senses, is to furnish lis-
teners with accurate information about the environment. We will see that
the dimension of timbre is particularly implicated in achieving this objec-
tive: not only does timbre carry the most information about a source and
its location (Butler 1973), but of all parameters of music, it is also carries
the most information about the environment through which the sound has
traveled. Human experience shows that in most cases, acquisition of audi-
tory information is accomplished with little difficulty. But, as the technol-
ogy of digital sound analysis becomes more sophisticated and accessible,
increasing evidence accumulates that what we hear-the source we iden-
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Wed, 30 Jan 2019 20:12:33 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
58 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2002
tify so easily-is often different, especially in timbre, than the sound that
digital analysis tells us was actually emitted. The difference is blatant be-
cause sound analysis can reveal only the physical characteristics of a sound,
and if it shows features different than those we perceive, we know that the
act of perceiving the sound has changed it. The paradox emerges with the
observation that while timbre is a dimension of central importance to iden-
tifying sources, it is also the dimension that is most divergent from the
sound in the physical world.
How can we reconcile the success with which we identify a source
with the fact that the sound we hear is demonstrably different in timbre
than the sound emitted by the source in question? The resolution of this
paradox is complex and will hopefully emerge in the remainder of this
paper, but for now, enough to say that auditory system does indeed iden-
tify sources, but it identifies a version of the sources that may not always
coincide with the version existing in the physical world. Instead, it per-
ceives sources according to its own expectations, sources that are consis-
tent with similar sources identified in the past, or that have characteristics
typical to an environment, though digital analysis might show them to be
completely anomalous by any measurable standard. The paradox exists
because however different the perceived version of a source might be to
the physical signal it represents, it is a version that works in our world, it
is a version that is consistent with versions of other listeners, it is a version
“real” enough that it allows us to deal with the physical environment. The
version is that source to us, and as long as it continues to work, we need
no other. That the paradox of timbre is rarely appreciated by ordinary lis-
teners is a sign that the system that processes sounds for perception is also
careful to keep its transformative operations outside of the awareness of
the listener.5 One of the proposals of this paper, however, is that in music
something happens to timbre that makes listeners aware of its paradox.
Timbre is a slippery concept and a slippery percept, perceptually mal-
leable and difficult to define in precisely arranged units. Though human
auditory acuity, on one level at least,6 is greater for the discrimination of
timbre than pitch, contrasts in pitch register on a conscious level more
immediately and starkly than timbre contrasts of equal magnitude. To the
general listener, pitch and loudness are variable characteristics of sound,
timbre is a condition; pitch and loudness are things a sound does, timbre
is what a sound is. Given that timbre is critical to human contact with the
environment and a sonic dimension we track with peculiar sensitivity, giv-
en that timbre is routinely cited as one of the four parameters of sound,
the fact that it attracts so little attention7 becomes itself part of the mys-
tery: timbre seems to do its considerable work with secretive discretion.
This paper proposes a theory of timbre that addresses its role in the
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Wed, 30 Jan 2019 20:12:33 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Fales: The Paradox of Timbre 59
larger sensation of musical sound. The theory begins with recent research
in timbre perception and applies it to music recorded in various contexts.
While the most persuasive validation of a theory like the one presented here
would include a number of extensively analyzed case studies, the limits and
objectives of this paper argue for breadth rather than depth of evidence.
For broadly confirming evidence, therefore, I draw on musical phenome-
na widely distributed throughout ethnomusicology literature, returning to
my own work in Burundi for deeper analytical demonstration. If the result
is a bit anecdotal or less than ideally thorough, my aim is to roughly map
out a neglected area of the musical experience, establishing coordinates to
be filled in with richer ethnographic study.
Timbre and the Unconscious
An interesting and revealing exercise is to play a short excerpt of
monophonic instrumental music several times to listeners who are utterly
unfamiliar with the instrument they are hearing. If asked to describe the
sound and its source, most listeners are surprised at the quantity of specific
information they are able to deduce from tiny, immensely subtle details,
all without conscious effort or reflection. But though they can easily deter-
mine that the unknown sound is, for example, an impulsive rather than a
sustained tone,” they must be prodded for this information with questions
as to the actions (plucking, bowing, blowing, etc.) the musician might be
making to play the instrument. They can, in other words, more easily de-
scribe the production of the sound than the perceived features of the sound
that allow them knowledge of its production.
The point of the exercise is to demonstrate three aspects of auditory
cognition. First, ordinary listeners with no special training possess an ex-
traordinary amount of knowledge about sound and its sources. Second,
while some source characteristics are implied by the pitch range and in-
tensity of its sound, listeners generally seem to base their knowledge of a
source and especially of its location, largely on qualities of timbre-on the
abruptness of an attack, for example, or a brightness of sound indicating
resilient resonating material-so much so, in fact, that timbre comes to be
identified with its source. Third, the information listeners are able to de-
duce from a sound is derived from a multitude of unremarkable acoustic
details of which a great deal have been processed and interpreted preat-
tentively9-that is, without listeners’ conscious awareness. I propose in this
paper that the dimension of timbre in particular is preattentive both in
processing and in the qualities that result from that processing.
In what sense is timbre unconscious? If we are conscious of hearing
first one instrument and then another, are we not conscious of timbre?
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Wed, 30 Jan 2019 20:12:33 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
60 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2002
While researchers continue to grapple with the facts that there seem to be
several kinds of consciousness and that it is a phenomenon of degrees, not
an all-or-none cognitive state, most seem to acknowledge a broad categor-
ical difference between consciousness as phenomenal experience and con-
sciousness as reflective self-awareness. Phenomenal consciousness might
include the warm sensation of the sun on one’s face, while reflective con-
sciousness would consist of the intellectual awareness of felt warmth, and
of the sun as the source of the sensation. Phenomenal consciousness is often
sensory or emotive, reflective consciousness is often verbal or representa-
tive-that is, one who is reflectively conscious can usually express the
nature of the experience. Though most often the two kinds of conscious-
ness occur together, they can occur individually as well.’o Without the viv-
idness of phenomenal consciousness, we must trust a less convincing reflec-
tive consciousness of our experience; without reflective consciousness, we
may be phenomenally conscious of an experience that is richly sentient,
but at the same time, hazy, ill-defined, and inexpressible. If indeed the
experience of timbre is preattentive, then it appears to be a case of phe-
nomenal but not reflective consciousness.
While relatively little of the research on consciousness has focused on
timbre perception specifically, work on auditory perception in general and
unconscious perception in other sensory modalities has been extensive,
yielding a set of characteristics common to both the process and the results
of preattentive perception. Many of these features-of which two are es-
pecially relevant to this discussion-are present in the experience of tim-
bre. For example, the hallmark characteristic of preattentive or unconscious
perception, a feature Merikle and Reingold call “indirect measure sensitiv-
ity” (1992), is obvious in the listening exercise above. Indirect measure
sensitivity alludes to the fact that preattentively processed information can
not be directly examined or evaluated, though it may be a source of input
to relevant problems. We may have difficulty describing, or even concep-
tualizing timbre as an independent musical parameter on the basis of di-
rect examination, but we use it easily to distinguish or characterize sounds.
A second characteristic of preattentive processing relevant to timbre
is the tendency of perceivers to attribute the effects of such processes to a
conscious phenomenon of outstanding perceptual salience, and to do so
with absolute conviction (Merikle & Daneman, 1998). For example, when
laboratory subjects are exposed to subliminal pictures of colored geomet-
ric shapes, then asked later to pick out the shapes they “saw” earlier, they
are unsuccessful, as predicted by the indirect measure sensitivity of uncon-
scious events. However, if the same subjects are asked to choose from
among several shapes those they find most attractive, not only do they
choose the shapes they were exposed to previously with a probability far
This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Wed, 30 Jan 2019 20:12:33 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Fales: The Paradox of Timbre 61
greater than chance, but they provide thorough, reasoned explanation for
their choice, insisting on factors such as a habitual preference for certain
shapes, colors, symmetries, etc. Their very knowledge of themselves is
influenced by the need to explain a choice whose real explanation has lit-
tle to do with aesthetic preference. Similarly, listeners may point to a change
in pitch or dynamic level in music to describe what is actually a variation
in timbre; it may be, in fact, that the disregard of timbre mentioned earlier
is as much the result of misattribution as true neglect.
Auditory Processing
With whatever degree of auditory unconsciousness, the fact remains
that listeners are amazingly and confidently good at deriving information
about the acoustic world from the perceived world it inspires. The distinc-
tion is important: the acoustic world is the physical environment where
sound as acoustic signal is produced and dispersed; the perceived world
is the subjective, sonic world created by listeners as a result of their trans-
lation of signals from the acoustic world. The acoustic world is available
through deduction and calculation, but never directly experienced. Sepa-
ration of the two domains is at least conceptually necessary, because as
noted earlier the correspondence between the two worlds, between sig-
nals from the acoustic environment and the auditory perception that results,
has proven to be far from exact. A given acoustic stimulus may not excite
the same percept in all listeners, nor even in the same listener across mul-
tiple exposures. Auditory perception more often than not depe
