I went to a concert last night. It was an orchestra and three singers performing mash-up arrangements of Aaron Copland and Bon Iver music. It had been a while since I had been to the symphony, and I was struck by just how discernible every instrument was. If I closed my eyes, I could point to where each player was on stage just using my ears. I was amazed at what sounds could be coaxed out of such basic resonators like strings, pipes, blocks and membranes. And it made me wonder: What exactly makes an instrument have the timbre that it has? Do we know enough about the physics of sound and music to reverse engineer an instrument based on what we want its tone to sound like?
For example, a xylophone’s tone is determined by the length and mass of the wooden keys; its loudness is related to how hard it is hit, how the reverberations travel through the block and how the arch under they key is shaped; how long the key sounds is determined by how springy the wood is, and if the key rests on its nodes or slightly off; the spectrum of frequencies that accompany the formant that makes up the color of the tone is related to the density of the wood and internal reverberations. We know a lot about how to make a xylophone, probably enough to design the perfect tone without much trial and error.
This got me thinking. Could you design a completely new timbre using what we know about established ones? Like how an electronic musician crafts synthesized tones using a few basic parameters… only with physical objects as the generators and modifiers? Could I imagine what I want my new instrument to sound like and, using a dictionary of physical properties and their effects on the sound, could I create an instrument that actually sounds like what I imagined? Could an electronically synthesized voice and a physically generated voice sound identical?
I don’t think this is such a crazy idea. Basically every material around us makes sound, just not necessarily a aesthetically ‘musical’ sound. But artists have made music out of large boulders by carving very thin columns that resonate when struck or are agitated. Cymbals are basically sheet metal that is masterfully crafted to sustain a wave. Tree limbs and power lines rubbing together sound like a child crying. I saw a man who made an instrument that sounds very much like the human voice – he used a feedback loop to generate the tone and two cardboard tubes that slide together like a trombone change the pitch. In the Sigur Ros concert film Heima, one of the band members makes mallet instruments out of thin shale rock and out of hundred-year-old rhubarb stalks. And look at all the sounds the human body can make! Just about anything can be made into an instrument, and I postulate that there is an entirely new world of sounds that can be made using physical instruments if the imagination is creative enough.