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An Ecosemiotic Approach to the Analysis of Timbre

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  • By Maria Perevedentseva
  • Source: The Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies , pp 623-637
  • Publication Date: June 2025
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/9781835951033_39
  • Language: English
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This chapter proposes an ecosemiotic approach to the analysis of timbre in recorded popular music with a case study of the Detroit techno duo Drexciya's track ‘Digital Tsunami’. It outlines the state of the field of timbre scholarship, including insights from musicology, psychoacoustics and embodied cognition, and argues for an understanding of timbre as a field of interactive behaviour in order to move beyond binaristic frameworks that conceive of timbral identity negatively via difference. The ecosemiotic method is presented as a convergence between the semiotic realism of Charles S. Peirce with James Gibson's ecological theory of perception. Being grounded in gesture, the mutuality of the perceiver and the environment and the matereal basis of thought, it is argued that the ecosemiotic approach can provide access into the embedded and embodied affective and cultural identifications that timbre affords listeners as they strive to make sense of their musical worlds.

Keywords: C.S. Peirce ; Drexciya ; Ecological Theory of Perception ; Electronic Dance Music ; Embodied Cognition ; J.J. Gibson ; Multidimensional Timbre Space ; Music Analysis ; Semiotics ; Spectrogram

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An Ecosemiotic Approach to the Analysis of Timbre
Intellect , 623 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/9781835951033_39
/content/books/9781835951033.c37
/content/books/9781835951033.c37
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References

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References

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  2. Blake, David K. (2020), ‘Timbre’, in A. Rehding and S. Rings (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–27.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Bregman, Albert S. (1994), Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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  4. Buccella, Alessandra (2021), ‘The problem of perceptual invariance’, Synthese, September, pp. 13883–905, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03402-2.
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  5. Cannam, Chris , Landone, Christian and Sandler, Mark (2010), ‘Sonic Visualiser: An open source application for viewing, analysing, and annotating music audio files’, Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia 2010 International Conference, Firenze, 25–29 October 2010.
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  6. Clarke, Eric F. (2005), Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  7. Clarke, Eric F. , Williams, Alan E. and Reynolds, Dee (2018), ‘Musical events and perceptual ecologies’, The Senses and Society, 13:3, pp. 264–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2018.1516023.
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  8. Costall, Alan (1995), ‘Socializing affordances’, Theory & Psychology, 5:4, pp. 467–81, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354395054001.
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  9. Curry, Ben (2017), ‘Valency–actuality–meaning: A Peircean semiotic approach to music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association,142:2, pp. 401–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2017.1361177.
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  10. Dolan, Emily I. (2013), The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
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  11. Drexciya (2002), Harnessed the Storm, 2xLP, Vinyl, Germany: Tresor.636
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  12. Eidsheim, Nina Sun (2018), The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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  13. Elferen, Isabella van (2020), Timbre: Paradox, Materialism, Vibrational Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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  14. Eshun, Kodwo (1998a), More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, London: Quartet Books.
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  15. Eshun, Kodwo (1998b), ‘Fear of a wet planet’, The Wire, January, pp.18–20.
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  16. Fales, Cornelia (2002), ‘The paradox of timbre’, Ethnomusicology, 46:1, pp. 56–95, https://doi.org/10.2307/852808.
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     [Google Scholar]
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  20. Gibson, James J. (1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Classic ed., New York: Psychology Press.
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  32. Siedenburg, Kai , Saitis, Charalampos and McAdams, Stephen (2019), ‘The present, past and future of timbre research’, in K. Siedenburg , C. Saitis , S. McAdams , A. N. Popper and R. R. Fay (eds), Timbre: Acoustics, Perception, and Cognition, Springer Handbook of Auditory Research 69, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 1–19.
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  33. Smalley, Denis (1994), ‘Defining timbre: Refining timbre’, Contemporary Music Review, 10:2, pp. 35–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494469400640281.
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  35. Spencer, Edward K. (2017), ‘Re-orientating spectromorphology and space-form through a hybrid acoustemology’, Organised Sound, 22:3, pp. 324–35, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771817000486.
     [Google Scholar]
  36. Théberge, Paul (1997), Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England.
     [Google Scholar]
  37. Tomlinson, Gary (2016), ‘Sign, affect, and musicking before the human’, Boundary 2, 43:1, pp. 143–72, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3340673.
     [Google Scholar]
  38. Turino, Thomas (1999), ‘Signs of imagination, identity, and experience: A Peircian semiotic theory for music’, Ethnomusicology, 43:2, pp. 221–55, https://doi.org/10.2307/852734.
     [Google Scholar]
  39. Turino, Thomas (2014), ‘Peircean thought as core theory for a phenomenological ethnomusicology’, Ethnomusicology, 58:2, pp. 185–221, https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.2.0185.
     [Google Scholar]
  40. Wallmark, Zachary (2019a), ‘A corpus analysis of timbre semantics in orchestration treatises’, Psychology of Music, 47:4, pp. 585–605, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735618768102.
     [Google Scholar]
  41. Wallmark, Zachary (2019b), ‘Semantic crosstalk in timbre perception’, Music & Science, 2, p. 2059204319846617, https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204319846617.
     [Google Scholar]
  42. Wallmark, Zachary , Iacoboni, Marco , Deblieck, Choi and Kendall, Roger A. (2018), ‘Embodied listening and timbre: Perceptual, acoustical, and neural correlates’, Music Perception, 35:3, pp. 332–63, https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332.
     [Google Scholar]
  43. Watts, Christopher M. (2008), ‘On mediation and material agency in the Peircean semeiotic’, in C. Knappett and L. Malafouris (eds), Material Agency: Towards 637a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, New York and London: Springer, pp. 187–207.
     [Google Scholar]
  44. Weheliye, Alexander G. (2002), ‘“Feenin”: Posthuman voices in contemporary Black popular music’, Social Text, 20:2, pp. 21–47, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-20-2_71-21.
     [Google Scholar]
  45. Williams, Ben (2001), ‘Black secret technology: Detroit techno and the information age’, in A. Nelson and T. L. N. Tu (eds), Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, New York and London: New York University Press, pp. 154–76.
     [Google Scholar]
  46. Windsor, Luke (2004), ‘An ecological approach to semiotics’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 34:2, pp. 179–98, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0021-8308.2004.00242.x.
     [Google Scholar]
  47. Zacharakis, Asterios , Pastiadis, Konstantinos and Reiss, Joshua (2014), ‘An interlanguage study of musical timbre semantic dimensions and their acoustic correlates’, Music Perception, 31:4, pp. 339–58, https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2014.31.4.339.
     [Google Scholar]
  48. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon (2018), ‘The spectromorphology of recorded music: The shaping of sonic cartoons through record production’, in R. Fink , Z. Wallmark and M. Latour (eds), The Relentless Pursuit of Tone. Timbre in Popular Music, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 345–66.
     [Google Scholar]

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