Cultural Timbre as Unvoiced Knowing: An Audiovisual Spectral Synthesizer That Transforms Chinese Musical Instruments
Yong Zhao; Marcel Zaes Sagesser
- oral
- Paper PDF link
- Presence: remote
- Duration: 13
- Type: medium
- Session: Theory in Practice
Abstract:
SonoChrom is an installation based on an audiovisual spectral timbre synthesizer made out of four traditional Chinese music instruments. The installation demonstrates how sonic timbre is connected to a specific culture, activates unvoiced knowing, and bears potential for expressivity similar to that of a human voice. Timbre – sometimes under-used given a widespread dominance of pitch, rhythm, or musical tone – might matter in everyday (technological) culture as a signifier of, and activator for, unvoiced cultural knowledge. Encounters with particular timbres can activate embodied memories and personal associations.
Inspiring a shift in thinking towards a timbre-first, culturally situated, and multi-sensory interaction model, the authors present a digital installation, in which audiences play with remodeled sounds of Chinese instruments. In ancient Chinese aesthetic discourses, timbre is framed as an expressive device similar to the human voice, as a parameter through which thought and emotion can be conveyed with immediacy and depth. Through recording sessions, a corpus of samples was created and spectrally decomposed into partials – which are then recombined in hyper-realistic ways in the installation. A screen-based, aestheticized visualization based on the shapes of the four instruments renders timbral changes as evolving motion textures.
This paper documents the installation and advances a timbre-first approach, arguing that technologically shaped timbre, when deployed as an interactional device, offers significant potential for contemporary digital applications. As a multi-sensory system, SonoChrom offers experiential engagement with Chinese sound culture through timbre and visualizations.