I consider myself more visual than auditory though I have practiced both styles of arts since my youth. That said, I’ve just started taking music lessons again (yay!) and I am somewhat stuck on something.
In my practice book on “tone” the author (Trevor Wye, I believe) makes reference to color. He says “this should be a middle tone-yellow” or something. I’m likely overthinking this but I really don’t know what that means. As a visual artist, yellow has significant range from cool and light to hot and saturated…translating that into sound feels difficult.
As an amateur musician with both classical and rockandroll experience, I have no idea what a generic ‘yellow’ tone is. Maybe, mayyybe – but I don’t have much hope – with more context (what instrument we’re talking about, what kind of sound he’s talking about, more of the passage) I might guess what he means. But there’s no universal code ‘yellow’ = ‘smoother, slightly tinny’ or whatever.
Ok: it’s a flute. Wye is describing a piece called “The Aquarium.” He says,
“This needs a hollow, ‘pure’ tone which will be called a ‘yellow’ tone…(then explains further) When both lower and middle registers have been practiced for some months, you may find there is still a rather different color between the lower and middle registers. Whatever color you start on, keep that color into the middle register.”
I think it’s an analogy to “timbre,” and related to harmonic structures. A “bright” tone might have more harmonics than a “dull” one, but if you’re going to call it red or blue, you’re crossing the line into highly-subjective, non-standard descriptions.
That actually makes sense, given that the piece does sound like fish swimming. I think I’m starting to understand what they mean, despite the subjectivity (with which I concur). That was really helpful–thank you!
I agree that its analogous to timbre, although poorly explained.
It seems intended as an aid to the student in visualizing (auralizing?) the specific timbre to strive for. Woodwinds (and many other instruments, of course) have a number of variances in timbre as the pitch changes from the top to the bottom of the range of the instrument. The oboe and bassoon are most noted for this, but it applies to flutes as well.
Although I don’t teach flute (plucked strings & keyboards are my forte) I would generally show that via demonstration, along with a description of the target timbre vis a vis notation/pitch.
It seems clunky to describe the concepts in words alone, but perhaps in a purely written context that’s how the author felt the idea was conveyed best.
When flipping through the book I also notice a phrase that says “try not to sound like a paper bag full of wasps” and oddly I knew exactly what he meant!
I’ve heard of a white tone, which is very, very pure, and has very few harmonics. It also usually has no vibrato. When I hear of a yellow tone, I would think of one that was just a little bit darker, and had the faintest feeling of vibrato. This would be analgous to thinking of yellow as slightly darker than white.
From the quote, it almost sounds like the guy is just giving the color a name to be able to talk about it. It’s a term he’s defining solely for use in his book. Though “hollow” and “‘pure’” would be a good description for what I’d think the term would mean: hollow means few harmonics, like when you whistle, and pure means with little variation, i.e. little vibrato.
Just an interesting tidbit: in German, timbre is actually called Klangfarbe, or tone color. I have never heard anybody describe a note as yellow or blue before, though.
In my experience, a lot of musicians seem to be endlessly fascinated with synesthesia (a disorder where people see colours when they hear sounds). Zombywoof already posted a link above. It’s so tempting because the language we have for the different kinds of timbres in music is rather vague, and it would be nice to think you can just assign a colour to a particular kind of sound and have done with it.
It’s nonsense because no two people with synesthesia see the same colours for the same kinds of sounds. There can be no “language of colours” for music because no two people will ever agree what colour represents which kind of sound. So when you hear people go on like this, go ahead and assume they’re just bullshitting.
Yes, but there are some of those “master [what they call] perfect [sic] pitch” things that “work” on this principle.
Yellow tone? Brown tone? Who the hell thinks this is a good explanatory tool? Maybe some synaesthetes think this way (IIRC Gould used to think of G-major as kind of green in color, or something), but no sane musician could ever expect to be taken seriously with such a retarded descriptive lexicon.
Okay, I like absurdism as much as the next guy (except that one time at Hardee’s when the next guy happened to be Samuel Beckett). But this seems like a perfectly rational, helpful sign. If you’re driving along in cold weather, it’s downright life-saving. Why is it your favorite?
I prefer to interpret this as “those things involving navigating an obstacle demand more mindful transgression versus the otherwise straightforward path.” I could be off on that but its made sense to me for some reason to think of that sign that way.
This is why “sampled” instrument sounds reproduced by a synthesizer often sound so unnatural. The original sample is often of only a single note played on the “real” instrument in question, and then that single note is modulated up or down to produce the other notes. This sounds okay if the modulated notes are fairly close to the originally-sampled note, because the timbre will still be fairly close to what it should be. But the farther you get from that original note, the frequency changes correctly but the timbre is still that of the original note. And that’s when people who are familiar with how the original instrument sounds will start thinking, “That doesn’t sound right”.
So better samples will sample multiple notes from across the range of the instrument so that no modulated note will be very far from the sampled note, and the best samples will sample every single note the instrument can produce.
I didn’t realize people were still making sampled instruments any other way – at least in keyboards (modelling seems to be more the way things are going for a while yet, but I think most of the jack-in-all-trades boards are sampled, and plenty of higher-end models as well). Not just every note sampled, but lots of different “velocity” levels for each note as well. I’m talking about things like a Rhodes piano or an acoustic piano, where hitting a note harder gives a different (sometimes very different) tone.
People really make commercial gear by taking one sampled note and “stretching” it across the range of the instrument? That even sounds like it would sound bad!
I couldn’t say if manufacturers still do it that way, but I’m sure old recordings made with that kind of synth are still out there. There are software synths that still work that way, though I wouldn’t call them “commercial”.