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I recently taught a graduate music seminar titled "Timbre at the Crossroads," which focused on how the idea of timbre has been constructed across disciplinary frames, in various times and places, by many different actors.1 A grounding premise was that timbre is best understood as a relational entity, a name placed on a set of sonic parameters, the bounds of which lack clear consensus and are constantly being negotiated. Listening in multiple directions, we engaged with a wealth of cross-disciplinary scholarship that has come to define the contemporary field of timbre studies, including sources from music theory, (ethno)musicology, composition, psychoacoustics, history, linguistics, sociology, and science and technology studies. Likewise, we moved freely between time scales, making macro-historical connections between eighteenth-century organological treatises and twenty-first-century assisted-orchestration software, while also tuning into the micro-temporal aspects of timbre as a multidimensional aspect of sound and musical expression. This broad spectrum of methodologies revealed the extent to which timbre is entangled with a vast range of epistemic instruments, cultural practices, and listening techniques, yielding numerous, often incongruent, answers to even the most basic of questions: what is timbre?
For much of the twentieth century, responses to this question were driven by scientific discourse, or else by the instrumental aesthetics and orchestration concerns of Western classical composers, with these areas sometimes overlapping in historical articulations, as happened, for instance, at the Parisian Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in the 1970-1980s. Scientific accounts emerging from this technocultural milieu, such as the wellknown "timbre space" model from psychoacoustics,2 have worked to establish correlations between acoustic signals and timbre perception, relaying the results of hearing tests into a functional definition of timbre that has been used as the basis for developing new sound technologies and compositional techniques. Today, the continued influence of this tradition is registered by the impressive scale of initiatives like the ACTOR Project (Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration), an ongoing grant-funded network of international research institutes, private industry, and supporting government agencies brought together to study the role of timbre in orchestration.3 But novel approaches have also taken hold, as seen in the historical-materialist turn taken by new organology,4 the rise of interpretive frameworks in popular music studies,5 and the increased use of ethnographic methods for studying...