An instrument does not conform to any theoretical definition, except permanence-variation, which we have mentioned above (section 1.3), a concept that dominates all musical phenomena. Every device that makes it possible to obtain a varied collection of sound objects—or of varying sound objects—while keeping us aware of the permanence of a cause, is a musical instrument, in the traditional sense of an experience common to all civilizations.
If the description “musical” is attached mainly to the variety and the arrangement of the collection of objects, the instrument will reveal registers and will give rise to a domain of music dominated by the resultant structures. If the description is applied mainly to the objects themselves, which are interesting in their form or matter but isolated and disparate enough not to have registers, and not leading to any structures, we discover a type of instrument some examples of which can be found in the tradition but which have always been placed, by Westerners at least, on the fringes of music: for example, gongs, cymbals, cowbells, and other bits and pieces. These instruments do not, it is true, give a collection of distinct objects with an abstract quality that could allow them to be graded, but stereotypical objects, although in a variety of examples, differentiated only by concrete characteristics. Thus instrumental practice already reveals the alternation between a sound structure and the characteristics of a structured sound.
Concentrating exclusively on the abstract in music leads, of course, to a system of classification that depends on this: instruments with fixed or melodic sounds, instruments with indeterminate sounds (percussion) for rhythmical use, interplay of timbres. But, since pitch dominates, the greatest emphasis will be placed on instruments that have a register of predetermined pitches (temperaments, keyboards) and allow the use of continuous pitches (stringed instruments or instruments with slides, for example).
There could also be a system of classification based on a “major feature” of the materials of the sound bodies (strings, wood, wind) or, again, from a prominent aspect of their technology (keyboards, percussion, bows . . .).
Now, both systems of classification are defective for similar reasons: the first involves referring the instrument back to an established musical system and the second to the details of a given instrumentarium. For the resources of an instrument go far beyond the registration intended for it. Nor do they depend as closely as people think on its technology or a system of classification by families; based on the procedures, a particular instrumentarium is not necessarily a good system of musical classification—that is, one based on effects.
Neither of these classification systems properly highlights the potential inherent in the sound sources themselves, particularly the variety and freedom of ways of playing. This latter notion is the most important: not just the instrument in itself but also the relationship it allows with the instrumentalist. But this relationship and its twofold potential, abstract and concrete, cannot be understood without a universal concept of the musical instrument, and in practice the musician hardly ever reflects on this.
We would say that a musical instrument has three components, the first two being essential. They are the vibrating mechanism, which starts to vibrate, and the stimulating mechanism, which starts the vibration off or, in the case of sustained sounds, prolongs it; the third component, which is secondary but almost always present, is the resonator—that is, a device that adds its effects to those of the vibrating body to amplify, prolong, or modify them in some way.1
We can therefore easily compare a violin, a piano, a gong, or a pipe. They all have a vibrating component: strings for the violin and the piano, a membrane or a column of air for the gong and the pipe. The stimulating component, for the piano or the gong, is short-lived, a hammer or bass drumstick; for the violin or the pipe we have a sustaining stimulator, a bow or the breath. Finally, the first two instruments have such clearly visible resonators that they hide the whole instrument all by themselves: the encasement of the violin, and the soundboard of the piano, while the last two have no resonators at all.
As soon as a system of classification such as this is sketched out, it sheds much light, as we will see, on the approach to another system of classification, much more difficult this time: the classification of sound objects themselves, obtained from sources, or sound bodies (this distinction, which we have already used previously, is fundamental). A pizzicato on the violin is infinitely nearer to a note on the piano than a sustained violin sound, which in its turn can be compared to a sustained sound on the pipe.
Besides, for as long as he sees the instrument at the same time as he hears it, the listener is psychologically conditioned and takes note of differences that seem huge to him. But if the instrument is hidden, or if the recording, without being in any way rigged, plays back only some moments of unevenness in intensity, extraordinary confusions become possible, which demonstrate the similarity between sounds or, more precisely, sound objects, perceived musically, from sources that are radically different either because of the principle of the instrument (bowed or wind instruments; tempered instruments or instruments with indeterminate sounds) or their historic or ethnological construction.
Once a sound source has been discovered, the instrument maker has two choices: to repeat the same source and extend it into various sizes or, conversely, to stay with the same source and try to vary it in itself. The second procedure is not the simplest, as it will inextricably link together the three components: vibrating, stimulating, and resonating. It is likely that circumstances will oblige the instrumentalist not to use these variations independently of each other but to use them together in keeping with the aesthetics of the object. Thus, a violinist can only use high notes with care, within a limited and precarious register of intensities and timbre.
This is true above all of the voice, which cannot be compared to any precisely and suitably calibrated instrument. Any analysis of the voice that does not, from the outset, accept that there is a close relationship between timbre, pitch, and intensity, not to mention duration and dynamics,2 will probably not be very true to life.
If, however, we move on to multiple instruments composed of a number of vibrating bodies, we can see immediately that each of these vibrating bodies repeats the combination of all three components. The piano, which seems to be one of the simplest, required a long and difficult process of development, precisely because it involved varying the collection of vibrating elements, while at the same time keeping the percussive elements and the resonator unchanged as far as possible. Even so, we should point out the crudeness of the procedures that were used, since the strings must be doubled or tripled depending on the register; if we listen carefully, when it goes from high to low, there is hardly any similarity between the various performances of the same percussion-resonance device. This does not stop the musician from speaking of the “timbre” of the piano as if it were a single entity. The timbre of the piano is recognizable, it is true, and the most out-of-tune piano can be identified by the most inexpert listener. But it is surprising that acousticians have been taken in for so long by such an obvious booby trap. So let us say, a priori, that it is highly likely that the piano does not have a timbre but several, as many timbres as notes.
Although indispensable for giving an account of different types of instrumentarium, the above analyses do not tell us anything about what a musical instrument essentially is. We must look elsewhere, to the relationship of the instrument with the sound families it produces. So what, without going into details, is both essential and enough to say to give a full account of its musical functions?
If the definition we gave at the beginning of this chapter is right, this should emerge from the definition itself. On the one hand, what is the permanent element, common to all the sound objects that come from one instrument? And, on the other hand, what are its capacities for variation?
(a) “Timbre,” a permanent quality of the instrument
In response to the first question, all we will give is a tautology, as at the moment we know of no other acceptable definition of timbre than this: “that by which we can recognize that various sounds come from the same instrument.” At least in this way we avoid long explanations, like the doctors in Molière, of “why your daughter is dumb.”3 We will hope to do better later on.4
(b) Instrumental registers, sources of “abstract” variations
Quite independently of what type of instrument it is, we discover a registration for it—not, as we may be prematurely tempted to say, a sound structure that can be detected in the series of objects it delivers but what produces the variation of these objects, not exactly the effects but the totality of causes involved in producing them. This distinction, subtle for those who have not yet noticed it (and this is generally the case with traditional musicians), is nevertheless essential. It is one thing to notice that the violin string is shortened, quite another to hear that its notes are more, or less, high; one thing to observe the register of the piano keyboard, quite another to analyze the nature of the notes it produces.
Of course, there are multiple registers in any instrument: a main register that, in advanced instruments, in theory controls the pitch, and secondary registers that, to employ the usual terms, act on intensity or timbre.5 The distinction between causes and effects we have just made immediately demonstrates its usefulness: since the variations produced by these different registers are, as we have seen, perceived at the level of effects, it would be wise to study these effects in themselves, causally, taking care not to make any hasty inferences concerning structures as they are perceived in the musical mind: even if there is correlation, there is not necessarily coincidence.
(c) Instrumental play, the source of “concrete” variations
Until now the instrument has been a given. Although made, and calibrated in accordance with certain more or less precise rules, it is inert; it is played only in the mind. It is quite another thing to place it in the hands of an instrumentalist, a particular instrumentalist. We will not consider here the situation, perfectly possible however, in which, like John Cage, the instrumentalist plays the instrument in registers and for uses for which it was not intended. Even observing the rules of play, he can deliver varieties of objects that bring out his own shaping of sound. In the most stereotyped of instruments, the piano, it is accepted that there is a “touch” specific to the pianist, in the same way that people speak of a rider’s “style,” however mediocre the horse. A fortiori, a violinist or a flautist is capable of drawing from the instrument a variety of objects that are, however, within the same registers and have the same form: slurred or staccato objects, pizzicato, vibrato, and so forth, but where their personality, their “sound” as people say, dominates, for it would not be enough to use the word timbre here either.
Thus we find ourselves faced with a trinity of factors that from now on will pervade nearly all our analyses. Sound, drawn from the physical world, requires first and foremost care in the making. The instrument is therefore studied in itself, as a physical device. At the other extreme this device only has meaning through its aesthetic purposes, which are completely dominated by “musical ideas.” Finally, the traditional instrument is traditionally activated by an artist, the performer, who brings with him a certain degree of originality: the score indicates how he should use the instrument for both abstract and concrete effects and leaves him a margin of freedom to demonstrate both his virtuosity and his sensibility.
When a new way of making instruments comes to light, we instinctively approach it in these three ways. When we want to construct an instrument, we endeavor to imagine one with registers that are as rich and abundant as possible, producing the most complex and delicate structures, and, finally, giving the instrumentalist opportunities for extended and subtle ways of playing. Such was the list of specifications with which every new instrument, and particularly the electronic instrument, had to comply, even before it came into being.
First we will briefly summarize the doctrines of the electronic instrument’s protagonists. Musical pitch corresponds to the number of oscillations per second of an electronic circuit, played back by an electroacoustic “engine” (a loudspeaker). A pitch comes either from a pure frequency, calculated in numbers of hertz, or a combination of frequencies, the proportions of which determine the timbre6—harmonic timbre, in the case of a harmonic sound reconstituted by the basic sound and its harmonic partials; color, when arbitrary frequencies are put together, creating a complex sensation of pitch and timbre mingled together.
So, compared with the crude way the piano functions, with its scales or temperaments, infinite possibilities are opened up for experimentation on “bundles of frequencies,” from white noise (a random accumulation of components whose frequencies fill the whole of the spectrum) to complex sound,7 calculated in advance from the number and intensity of its frequencies. Similarly, the interplay of levels of intensity can be accurately calibrated for each bundle of frequencies. Finally, the profiles,8 that is, the way the intensities, overall or partial, develop in relation to time, can be predetermined.
The score now becomes a blueprint, as we are able to give a precise description of every sound through a reference trihedron, where the axes time, frequency, and dynamic level correspond respectively to sensations of duration, pitch, and intensity. As for the immediate timbre, this is the overall coloration of the sound matter, that is, of the bundle of frequencies, each with its own intensity, presented to the ear at a given moment.
It is not surprising that a whole generation of composers, instantly seduced by correlations such as these, should immediately have embarked on constructions in which everything could be calculated in advance . . . except the effect. For, by rushing headlong like this into systems of composition, they sidestepped the phase of authentic experimentation: the phase that would have been about the correlations between our musical perceptions and such abundantly available stimuli. As for physicists, they could consider their work finished, since they had developed instruments, truly perfect from the physical point of view, that allowed the most extensive use of the three acoustic parameters.
The quite unexpected consequences might have provided food for thought; even if the scores were perfectly intelligible, the resultant sounds were surprising. Not because of their complexity but because a number of rapidly recognizable effects clearly revealed their “electronic” origins.
If we had managed to produce anything like a real reconstruction of traditional sounds by means of synthesis, this technique might have been perceptible like a fault in production; thus, in a bad recording of a symphony, we recognize both the orchestral instruments and the faults in the recording. But the phenomenon was quite different: the electronic source appeared as one of the instruments. While it claimed either to recreate preexisting timbres or to create appropriately varied “previously unheard” ones, it branded both with its own “timbre,” in the pragmatic definition we have given this term. As for the various modes of playing, they also seemed to become contained within their own particular qualities—not at all for want of originality, even less for lack of virtuosity, but again by accentuating an electronic character that was already perceptible in the sound materials.
Without being a failure in itself, electronic music therefore failed as far as its initial claims were concerned: to replace instruments and performers in one fell swoop, by giving composers a universal palette of sounds, together with an objective musical way of using them, and so to open up infinite possibilities while ensuring total virtuosity of performance. We could catch glimpses of such potential and such virtuosity but enclosed in a far too recognizable instrumental field and a form of aesthetic expression that depended on this.
Let us be quite clear: we are not saying that it could not, at a stretch, be different. But musicians fascinated by electronics must agree to revise their principles, to direct their aims accordingly, and above all, initially, to carry out methodical experiments with the registers and types of play at their disposal.
Musique concrète had followed a similar, and equally surprising, path: starting from the same sort of claim to universality, it also became enclosed in its own particular limitations. Without wishing either to go over or enlarge on what has been said elsewhere,9 we will restrict ourselves to what is directly relevant to our discussion.
The “concrete faction,” apparently, behaved differently from its electronic contemporaries. Having made a fresh start with registers and values, these musicians took their sounds from anywhere but preferably from acoustic reality: noises, traditional instruments (Western or exotic), voices, languages, and some synthetic sounds, to be sure that the panoply was complete. Then, by means of various electroacoustic manipulations, these recorded sounds were transformed and assembled. We will not for the moment place too much emphasis on the final processing of these musics, which were on magnetic tape and were developed by listening to several tracks simultaneously (stereophony) so that we could spend more time on the business of making them.
The speeding up and slowing down provided by the turntable in 1948, and soon after by the tape recorder, had initially been used in a chaotic fashion. But, if they were used along with splitting up sounds in time—by cutting the tape—and on the level of timbre—by filtering—we could assume with certainty that every sound could be decomposed and could then, through the techniques of editing and mixing, be recomposed with other sounds.
Thus, musique concrète definitely had the same pretensions as electronic music, which believed that it could produce any preexisting sound by synthesis. Only it went through a preliminary stage of analysis. It also used the name reference trihedron, to the invention and success of which the author is unfortunately no stranger.10
By cutting up sound according to the three axes of the trihedron—time, frequency, and dynamic level (by editing, filtering, and copying at different sound levels)—it was possible to isolate a “slab of sensation,” which, compared with synthetic sound, had the advantage of retaining the complex characteristics of the natural sound. Of course, it was just as possible to do the reverse: raise or lower these “slabs” in pitch, by slowing down or speeding up, only taking care to compensate for the simultaneous effect on time (this can be done automatically with the “universal phonogène”), recompose the spectra by mixing, and join up the elements again by collage.11
As can be seen, the thinking in both musics was centered on the same error: faith in the trihedron and the decomposing of sound, for one group into the Fourier series, for the other into “slabs of sensation.” At that time we were working, the former to construct robots, the latter to dissect corpses. Living music was elsewhere and would only give itself to those who knew how to escape from these simplistic models.
Furthermore, oddly, the works ended up resembling each other. Meanwhile, the pioneers had watered their wine. Whereas members of the “concrete faction” were gradually freeing themselves from the trap of their turntables, which in truth remained very crude, the “electronic faction” was making borrowings from musique concrète that were both unacknowledged and clearly apparent: voices, manipulated instruments, anything would do for a music where only the label of origin was purely electronic; and this label would eventually prevail, setting the initial misunderstanding in stone, doubtless for a long time to come.
A second error, common to the two systems and doubtless compounding the first, was the confusion, over quite a long period, between studio instruments and musical instruments.
The synthetic instruments of electronic music did indeed present a very subtle trap: they were wonderfully calibrated to create registers of sound and lent themselves to fascinatingly virtuoso uses. The same could not be said of turntables and tape recorders, which, in fact, were only recording devices, really intended for radio broadcasting, and which musicians had gradually infiltrated, not without conflicts or feelings of guilt. They nevertheless got results; amid so many formless and facilely surrealist works, so many failed experiments, an unexpected musical landscape was revealed to them, surprising, incongruous sound entities, where the most difficult question was what to do with them.
The first of these musics seemed to offer everything, in particular magnificent scores docilely obedient to any preconceived ways of organizing them. The other gave crude and explosive combinations of sound, ill-assorted objects that eluded any notation.
It was not obvious to “concrete” musicians that they should give up all electroacoustic manipulation, when they seemed to be there precisely for this, and the studio hung over them with all its working potential for new procedures. If, however, we compared a tape recorder with a traditional instrument, we could not deny a feeling of unease: manipulating even a well-chosen component on the tape recorder, by speeding it up or slowing it down, made it appear like a “special effect,” “rigged,”12 even more obviously than in electronic music.
Even so, every time we took the trouble to record with care, to choose sound entities judiciously, to vary what we did with them, through recording or purely acoustic devices, we obtained sound samples that were hugely varied and interesting.
Toward 1958, ten years after we began, metal sheets and rods appeared on the scene, and little by little our work moved from the electronic booth to the acoustic studio. Several provisional rules for using it were circulated: these allowed only a very small margin of intervention in recorded sound, forbidding practically all manipulation other than dissecting it in time, by editing it. But they lent themselves to a very considerable degree of initiative in the creation of acoustic sounds. Through prolonging traditional sounds, we rediscovered the concept of the instrument and the instrumentalist, as well as of performance that is sometimes spontaneous or chance rather than willed.
After this, with its name changed to experimental music, musique concrète, although continuing to use natural sound sources, abandoned overhasty manipulations; it endeavored to assemble sounds with as little distortion as possible. This change in behavior was accompanied by a radical change of attitude; we no longer considered sound in relation to the three acoustic parameters: we were dealing with perceived “sound objects” and with a new music theory to study them.
What had become of machines in all this? After being led into the temptation of considering them as musical instruments, we no longer attributed anything to them except the strange power to explain the phenomenon of sound. For a time there was no question of using them to make music but for musicianship—that is, for practicing better hearing.
After these historical sections, we will now endeavor to dispel any misunderstandings. And in the first place, by applying the criteria set out above (in sections 2.1 to 2.5) to the electronic instrument, we will gain a better understanding of the deception it caused.
In its basic workings it did not obey the definition of an instrument (section 2.1). Since it aimed to be the sum of all instruments at once, this meant that it had not only registers, in the sense that we defined this term, but a super-register: the register that would have allowed it to move from one instrument to another. In fact, the concept of instrument was downplayed. We thought we could go beyond it by means of structures; we were confused about the concept of timbre: we prematurely extrapolated the second meaning of the word, and timbre became simply a characteristic of the musical object, and no longer the perception of a common cause for a family of objects.
In truth, the same sort of thing had been done with the organ: this instrument does indeed remind us, quite naively, of different instrumental sources (these are the “stops,” in the precise organological sense), while, to all intents and purposes, the timbre remains that of the organ. But the electronic instrument failed through an excess of originality. Without being what it claimed to be—a universal instrument—it was undoubtedly a new instrument, a generator of original sounds, often never previously heard, with varied registers, and yet possessing what, in keeping with our own definition, we are obliged to call a characteristic timbre. But, paradoxically, at the two extremes the balance between permanence and variation were so completely upset that the instrument turned out to be almost too much for our customary musical ways.
To understand this more fully, we will apply the three criteria of our instrumental analysis to it (section 2.4).
It conforms well to the second of these, registers, where indeed it has remarkable richness. We cannot say the same about the other two.
First of all, it is clear that its stops give little room for interpretation. The objects, because they are all predetermined, give variety only in one sphere: abstract values, and not in the concrete sphere of live performance. It has no human presence, as a plastic object has no vegetable or mineral textures of wood or stone.
As for timbre, our contention from now on is that in traditional instruments it appears to result from subtle, and in general appropriately and cleverly applied, laws of association between the components of the objects in relation to their position in the register.13 In the electronic instrument these laws do not exist. All the variables can be used independently. So timbre is reduced to what the ear reveals of the causal identity of all these sounds: synthetic, predetermined, without any of those accidents, fluctuations, or imprecisions that an age-old musical conditioning has made indispensable for us and also without that indispensable continuity evenly spread over the whole register.
As can be seen, our criticism is based not on principles but rather on the contingencies of the way we are conditioned. It can therefore be either accepted or rejected. We are perfectly willing to accept that new ways of listening may be possible after a period of training. We find it difficult to believe, however, that our ear, and our entire sense of music, should willingly adjust to all and any disruptions of their usual practices: the presence of something living, something sensory behind the craftsman’s mark, seems inseparable from aesthetic appreciation and, similarly, the appreciation of instrumental identity. Once this identity is lost, what is there to hold on to when, in fatal disequilibrium, variation prevails over permanence?
In reality, if we ask ourselves what the instrument in “musique concrète” is, we find ourselves in a very awkward position. Is it the gathering of sounds in the studio and the intention to gather them from anywhere? The practice of recording and working with sounds that are preferably recorded? The use of special equipment for manipulating these sounds, changing their speed, filtering, mixing them?
None of this, in truth, answers our definition of the instrument, yet so constraining are musical practices that at the beginning of this research we instinctively made every effort to find, at any price, something that might fit in with them. Thus in 1948 I had imagined a “turntable piano” linking twelve gramophones to a controlling device that enabled them to be “played.” We will pause for a while over this ridiculous attempt. At least it has the merit of revealing something.
I did indeed have what appeared to be a musical instrument, which I had even dared to call “the most universal possible.” Suppose, in fact, that, with the help of the “closed groove” technique, the sound of musical instruments were engraved on the twelve records. On each record was a different pitch—chromatic, for example. The keyboard enabled the pitches to be played. A device would just about have allowed the gramophones to change groove and, as in the case of the organ, create registers for the instruments themselves. In fact, Dereux thought up a “recording organ” along the same lines: “sound synthesis,” which is not synthetic but depends on the phonographic reproduction of natural sounds.
But—we will not spend time on Dereux’s organ,14 which was judiciously restricted to the reproduction of some of the most illustrious organ sounds—my “most universal instrument possible,” if it could have been made, would only have given a crude combination of sounds, equivalent to the orchestra. At best, a sort of organ capable of giving continuity even to short-lived, and thus self-contained, sounds. Except, and this is important, for the fact that it could use the permanent character of sounds, the only innovation it would have contributed would have been a barbaric reduction, for a single player, of the performers in the orchestra.
We shall now move on to the opposite type of experience, since, by 1950, those attempts were to be abandoned in favor of magnetic recording and editing.
Do sounds, however they are processed later, always stand in relation to an instrumental device? In other words, where, between our filters and our transposers, will we rediscover our criteria?
Contrary to what was possible with the electronic instrument, there was no leeway in register but, in contrast, extraordinary potential for performance both in the invention of sound entities captured by the microphone and in the interventions after recording. Finally, if all electronic effects were avoided, there was, of course, no instrumental timbre, every sound object clearly proclaiming its own origin.
We can see how both developments ended, in quite different ways, in the negation of the instrument as the instrument of a specifically musical expression. One of the musics was the by-product of a juggling of parameters, the other a simple juxtaposition of objects.
Both musics are affected by opposing types of imbalance in relation to normal instrumental structure. They meet at extremes, where they share the fact that they have severely strained our usual practice in relation to one or another of our three norms. Thus we can see—and this is still odd—that the ear perceives indiscriminately, as one and the same fault, the errors that arise from music that is too concrete or too abstract. Having already briefly mentioned the second, we will concentrate mainly on the first.
(a) Excess of timbre
Sounds that are speeded up or slowed down without proper care show a variation so bound up with their cause that the two are no longer dissociated; thus, properly speaking, there is no longer any balance between permanence and variation. This goes against the very definition of the instrument. It is no longer forgotten; it makes its presence felt as an event. We have gone beyond the blueprint of music. And this is why anything that suggests the melodic wailing of sirens without careful handling will always seem to be alien to musical discourse, even though it may be perfectly justified as a structure.
If speeding up and slowing down affect both the rhythm and the tessitura of the object, the permanence-variation relationship will seem so rigid that the event, with or without the siren effect, will appear like a sound effect—that is, totally bound to its causality, without the freedom necessary for music.
The reader will see how much we need to extend the meaning of the word in our definition of timbre, or instrumental permanence. By way of amusement let us compare it to its traditional definition, using what, for us, is called “the speeding up timbre.” If we accelerate a vocal or piano sound, taking care to eliminate the parallel rhythmic effect, nothing, according to acousticians, will change: the whole spectrum of frequencies is simply transferred. The timbre of the sound under consideration, for them characterized by this spectrum, should therefore remain exactly the same, and only the tessitura should change. This would be the ideal musical instrument from the point of view of consistency of timbre in the objects it provides.
But what do we find? The piano becomes shrill, the voice begins to waver and bleat. . . . This is because, precisely, the speeding up does not affect the “spectral” timbre of objects, whereas a real musical instrument combines its effects in relation to the tessitura, so that the composition of the objects varies according to precise and precious laws. Acousticians, while defining timbre as a quality peculiar to each sound, also habitually speak of the timbre of an instrument, implicitly assuming that this quality has a certain consistency. In truth, if the timbre of an instrument is recognizable, in the original meaning we gave in section 2.4, this is because the objects that this instrument delivers each have a timbre in the scientific sense and, above all, because there are laws relating to the instrument that link these timbres together. On the contrary, when an object is accelerated, its physical timbre is an invariable, and the different examples of it in the tessitura clearly show this invariance as a specific timbre of speeding up. We could therefore say that speeding up, insofar as it is an instrument, is recognized by its “nil” timbre.
(b) Excess of register
A consequence of the above comment: a registration that reveals the instrument rather than fashioning the object will also be heard as a mechanical effect (another timbre if you will).
A filtering process, for example, can be presented as the use of a registration. By synthesis, we combine a particular group of frequencies with a view to obtaining an object. By analysis, applied to an earlier object, we extract a particular group of frequencies by filtering. The result? Occasionally identical, if the filtering has been done crudely or intensively, it is the filtering that is heard. The causality of the process is more noticeable than the variety of the objects made in this way. It is enough for now to draw attention to this strange phenomenon, without explaining it. The procedure obliterates the object, defaces it, marks it with its timbre, in the pejorative sense of this term.
(c) Excess of play
The above analyses already give an account of certain similarities, which were not slow to emerge over the first years of parallel experimentation, between electronic sounds and the manipulated sounds of musique concrète. They do not explain everything, in particular certain resemblances, generally in the type of faults, between the two musics at the level of languages. So we should seek the explanation in the excess of play (we are using the word play in its broadest sense, attributing to the composer a traditional function of the interpreter, whom this composer claimed to replace). An accumulation loaded with synthetic sounds and a crude analysis of a natural material both lead to a lack of economy of means. Too many intentions wear the object out or make it formless or unreadable.
It sometimes happened, however, in electronic music, as in musique concrète, that a series of well-formed and appropriately recorded objects showed relationships of permanence such that they seemed to come from the same instrument.
And this is very fortunate, for, otherwise, what could we have relied on to give a measure of coherence to the series of sounds spread over all the tessituras and in the most disparate durations and intensities? Therefore, without necessarily being aware of it, the contemporary musician often sought to link together a particular sequence of sounds with “something” that, pragmatically speaking, is the same as an instrumental timbre.
But then the foundation of this definition itself disappears; the ground gives way beneath our feet. In any work in which the composer, of concrete or electronic music, is incapable of naming the causal process that gave rise to a series of sounds, everything takes place as if these sounds came from a particular instrument. What is the timbre of an instrument that does not exist?
So here we are, at the end of our instrumental analysis, obliged to look elsewhere for this link, stronger even than structures and more mysterious: timbre, the definition of which, far too pragmatic, is crying out to be superseded. This will only happen after a long digression.