Nothing but Noise

Description

Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge explores how timbre shapes musical affect and meaning. Integrating perspectives from musicology with the cognitive sciences, author Zachary Wallmark advances a novel model of timbre interpretation that takes into account the bodily, sensorimotor dynamics of sound production and perception

• First book to present an interdisciplinary theory on the contribution of timbre to musical meaning
• Synthesizes original empirical results with humanistic interpretation
• Includes case study essays on free jazz, Japanese shakuhachi music, and heavy metal
• Incorporates the widest possible range of methodologies, from experimental psychology to continental ethics to reception studies and cultural theory
• Connects analysis of timbre to the paradigm of embodied cognition

About the Author(s)

Zachary Wallmark, Assistant Professor of Musicology, Univeristy of Oregon

Zachary Wallmark teaches musicology and music cognition at the University of Oregon. His interdisciplinary research on timbre and popular music has been supported by the NEH and the GRAMMY Museum Foundation. He is coeditor (with Robert Fink and Melinda Latour) of The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford, 2018).

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Meaning of Timbre
I. Fundamental
Chapter 1: Body and Emotion in the Sonic Act
Chapter 2: Conceptualizing Timbre: From Material to Metaphor
II. Spectrum
Chapter 3: The Most Powerful Human Sound Ever Created: Theorizing the Saxophonic Scream in Free Jazz
Chapter 4: Sound and Embodiment in the Japanese Shakuhachi
Chapter 5: Vector of Brutality: Madness, Violence, and Contagion in Heavy Metal Reception
III. Resonance
Chapter 6: The Aural Face
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Every musicologist should read this book, and it is required reading for those dealing with the cognition of music. Essential." - CHOICE

"In this book Zachary Wallmark confronts head on an aspect of musical practice that is at once elusive and essential: the enduring mystery of timbre. In Wallmark's hands, however, this mystery does not so much endure as become an entry point for exploring the bases of musical expression. Through a splendid blend of empirical research and humanistic inquiry, set out in lucid and approachable prose, he explains how timbre matters as well as why it matters. This is a foundational study that should be read by anyone who has wondered about why music matters, and by everyone who cares about how music shapes our social interactions." - Lawrence Zbikowski, Addie Clark Harding Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago

"With this book, Zachary Wallmark has made an ambitious contribution to the famously elusive study of musical timbre...Wallmark succeeds admirably in avoiding the shortcomings of both the scientific desire to study sound in isolation from the messiness of human subjectivity and the humanistic reduction of musical experience to the arbitrary play of cultural difference. His book is perhaps best viewed as an attempt not so much to bridge the 'two cultures' as to harmonize their best qualities." - Thomas Patteson, Journal of the American Musicological Society