The Oxford handbook of timbre / edited by Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding.

INTRODUCTION: Timbre: alternative histories and possible futures for the study of music / Emily I. Doland and Alexander Rehding -- PART I. PHILOSOPHIES: The Matter of Timbre : Listening, Genealogy, Sound / Daniel Villegas Vélez ; Deconstruction and Timbre / Naomi Waltham-Smith ; Timbrality : The Vibrant Aesthetics of Tone Color / Isabella van Elferen ; Qur'an alphabetics and the timbre of recitation / Peter McMurray ; Translations: Adorno and Dahlhaus ; The Function of Timbre in Music (1966) / Theodor W. Adorno ; On the Theory of Instrumentation (1985) / Carl Dahlhaus -- PART II. HISTORIES AND CULTURES: Ethereal Timbres / Emily Dolan and Thomas Patteson ; Timbre-Centered Listening in the Soundscape of Tuva / Theodore Levin and Valentina Süzükei ; Tracing Timbre in Ancient Greece / Naomi Weiss ; Early Modern Voices / Bettina Varwig ; Timbre Before Timbre : Listening to the Effects of Organ Stops, Violin Mutes and Piano Pedals c. 1650-1800 / Deirdre Loughridge ; Schoenberg as Sound Student : Pierrot's Klang / Joseph Auner ; Futurist timbres: listening failure in Milan, 1909-1914 / Gavin Williams -- PART III. TECHNOLOGIES: Timbral Thieverty: synthesizers and sonic materiality / Jonathan De Souza ; Timbre/Techne / Alexander Rehding ; Technology and Timbre : Features of the Changing Instrumental Soundscape of the Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914) / Elizabeth Bradley Strauchen-Scherer ; Don't Choose the Nightingale : Timbre, Index, and Birdsong in Respighi's "Pini di Roma" / Arman Schwart ; The Naturalization of Timbre : Two Case Studies / Alexandra Hui ; Music for Cochlear Implants / Stefan Helmreich -- PART IV. PERCEPTION AND ANALYSIS: Perceptual processes in orchestration / Meghan Goodchild and Stephen McAdams ; Timbre as Harmony-Harmony as Timbre / Robert Hasegawa ; Timbre and Polyphony in Balinese Gamelan / Michael Tenzer ; Describing Sound : the Cognitive Linguistics of Timbre / Zachary Wallmark and Roger A. Kendall ; Timbre, Komplexeindruck, and modernity: Klangfarbe as a catalyst of psychological research in Carl Stumpf, 1890-1926 / Sebastian Klotz ; Pitch vs. Timbre / Daniel K. S. Walden ; "Where were you when you found out singer Bobby Caldwell Was White?": racialized timbre as narrative arc / Nina Sun Eidsheim and Schuyler Whelden

"Despite its importance as a central feature of musical sounds, timbre has rarely stood in the limelight. First defined in the eighteenth century and denigrated during the nineteenth , the concept of timbre came into its own during the twentieth century's fascination with synthesizers and electronic music -or so the story goes. In fact, timbre cuts across all boundaries of musical thought -combining scientific and artistic approaches to music, material and philosophical aspects, and historical and theoretical perspectives. Timbre challenges us to fundamentally reorganize the way we think about music. The twenty-six chapters that made up this collection offer a variety of engagements with music from the perspective of timbre. The boundaries are as broad as possible: from ancient Homeric sounds to contemporary sound installations, from birdsong to cochlear implants, from Tuvan overtone singing to the TV show "The Voice", from violin mutes to Moog synthesizers. What unifies the essays across this vast diversity is the material starting point of the sounding object. This focus on the listening experience is a radical departure from the musical work that has traditionally dominated musical discourse since its academic inception in late nineteenth-century Europe. Timbre remains a slippery concept that has continuosly demanded more, be it more precise vocabulary, a more systematic theory, or more rigorous analysis. Rooted in the psychology of listening, timbre consistently resists a complet pinning down. This collection of essays provides an invitation for further engagement with the range of fascinating questions that timbre opens up." (solapa)