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by cannam 1932 days ago
> asked what makes each musical era distinctive: timbre

Anyone interested in this might enjoy the paper about the "Scanning the Dial" experiment. (It's about contemporary music rather than historical eras, but the idea is related)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248906443_Scanning_...

The punchline is that listeners can typically assign a genre to a recording after hearing a single quarter-of-a-second clip, but the paper is worth reading for its notes on genre and timbre in general.