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> Daniel Levitin: what makes each musical era distinctive: timbre was, in his opinion, the single most important factor That's a fascinating idea; I googled and found what might be the story you're looking for: [quote] In the best seller “This is your brain on music” by Daniel Levitin, he talks about John R. Pierce (inventor of the travelling wave vacuum tube and the first telecommunications satellite) who, interested to discover rock music, asked him to summarize the genre in a concise list of six songs. Levitin ended up with a list of songs from Little Richards, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Prince and the Sex Pistols. Interestingly, while listening, Pierce was not really interested by the songs themselves, their melodies, their harmonic structures or their rhythm characteristics, but he said he found the “timbres” to be remarkable and described them as being new, unfamiliar, and exciting. Levitin concludes his story by saying: “The way in which instruments were combined to create a unified whole - bass, drums, electric and acoustic guitars, and voice – that was something he (Pierce) had never heard before. Timbre was what defined rock for Pierce. And it was a revelation for both of us.” Quoted from "An Overview of the Concept of Timbre and its Use in Contemporary Music and Record Production" by Mathieu Bedwani |