We’ll begin with this dimension because listening for Timbre (and particularly different instruments) is the easiest way to start your Active Listening practice. Each instrument immediately distinguishes itself from others by its unique timbre, sound, or “tone colour”.
Scientifically, Timbre is the complex recipe of sound waves that makes up each instrument’s characteristic sound. It can also vary individually, from one performer or model of instrument to another.
When it comes to electronic instruments, this whole dimension becomes exponentially more varied, as different keyboard and synth players devise crazy new timbres, or as instruments such as the electric guitar—a veritable timbre-generating machine—is processed through all different kinds of pedals, amps and various other electronics.
There are lots of descriptive words that we use to describe Timbre.
For example, “twang”. We can say “Shania Twain sings with a twang.” With a singer that means they have a more nasal timbre. An instrument can be “twangy” too. For example, we can say a banjo typically sounds more “twangy” than a guitar.
We can also talk in terms of the complexity of a timbre, with words like “simple” or “rich”. For example, an electric guitar that isn’t plugged into an amplifier has a very simple timbre. It sounds like a metal wire being plucked, which is one of the simplest musical sounds we can create. Similarly, the triangle in an orchestra produces a very simple sound when it’s played.
On the other end of the spectrum, when you hear a cello play even a single note slowly, and with feeling, there is great richness and complexity to the sound which hits your ears. The human voice can have such a rich timbre that it connects deeply and emotionally with us—even without using words or having any complexity to the pitch or rhythms used.
Timbre is something to listen for in itself, along with how it contributes to the overall structures and textures in musical Form (which we’ll discuss more, later in the chapter).
Instrumental Timbre
Music uses Timbre in a variety of ways. Often, the contrasting timbres of instruments play off each other, but even individual instruments can use contrasting timbres in their performance.
For example the guitar—even a single acoustic guitar—can produce many different timbres, depending on how it’s played: close to the bridge, over the sound hole, close to the neck, with metal or plastic plectrums, fingernails or fingers.
Different individual instrument models, styles, woods, and techniques all contribute to the timbre. As you actively listen to different guitars and guitarists, for example, you’ll develop a deep appreciation for all the ways that Timbre can be used musically, and clarify what choices you will make in your own musical development and expression. The same goes for most instruments. They can produce a wide range of timbres, depending on the pitch range. Whether it’s a high or low note, for example, might yield a different kind of a timbre that you could be looking out for in your Active Listening. Or with a saxophone, for example, you may find you want to be adjusting your embouchure or the reed that you’re using to produce a certain timbre you’ve heard.
Listening for Timbre can therefore give you a clue as to what you might do with your instrument, or a particular sound that you might want to re-create, or be inspired by. This is a perfect example of how your Active Listening practice can inspire and fuel your own musical creativity.
This is one reason that if you play an instrument yourself, listening out for that instrument can be a great starting point in your Active Listening. You will have a headstart, because your ear and mind are already attuned to that instrument’s specific nature. And you will see a greater payoff faster, because your new listening discoveries can provide such direct application in your musical life.
Timbre and Genre
Timbre also can help you to listen for the genre of a piece of music. So for example, if you hear someone playing a saxophone with a round, deep sound which is called “sub-toning” then you might know to identify that with the jazz ballad genre.
If you hear the saxophone being played with a very wide, open kind of nasal tone, you might associate that instead with modal jazz from the 1960s. Or if you hear it being played with growling sounds (produced by singing and playing at the same time) you may associate that with rock’n’roll.
Learning these connections between Timbre and genre can also help you when you’re playing music, by revealing how to play appropriately for that genre.
You probably wouldn’t want to be playing a big growly saxophone sound on an old jazz standard ballad! Similarly, a guitarist would choose certain guitar sounds because these vary by the genre. The guitar sound that you would use for metal won’t be the same as the one you’d use for jazz.
As well as these individual instrument timbre considerations, there are different ways that instruments combine their timbres together (“ensembles”) that can also tell you about what kind of music it is.
For example, if you hear a banjo, a mandolin, a fiddle, a bass, and a guitar, you’re likely listening to bluegrass or some kind of Americana music.
If you’re hearing a string quartet, often it will be classical music. Or, if you’re hearing sections of saxophones, trumpets, trombones, along with bass guitar and a piano, you might be listening to big band jazz.
So different instrumentations are associated with different genres of music, and listening for Timbre is your gateway to identifying those instrumentations—and by extension, the likely genre.
Again, remember that these are guidelines and not strict rules! In fact, the musical effect is often enriched when genres cross paths. For example, bringing a banjo into a rock’n’roll band evokes a taste of a different genre, adding richness to the music.
How to Start Listening for Instruments and Timbre
As you start actively listening for timbres and different instruments, one exercise that can get you quite far is to simply pick one instrument, “tune in” to it in the mix, and follow it throughout the song.
By default, we as music listeners tend to be focused on the most prominent instrument (the “lead” instrument) at any given time. In certain songs, there might be an instrument that’s always in the lead, but more often it varies over time. The challenge for you as an active listener is to follow a particular instrument whether it is the “lead” or not!
For example, you might practice listening to the electric guitar in a certain rock song, but most of the time the guitarist won’t actually be leading through the whole song. There might be a vocalist coming in, and when they sing the guitar will be playing counter-melodies, or backing riffs. Or the guitar may switch between lead and rhythm playing, becoming more prominent when playing a solo as lead and less prominent when playing the rhythm guitar part in the background. Can you follow that same guitar even as its role and prominence changes?
If you listen out for that timbre, and follow the guitar through the song, you’re going to learn a lot about what things you’ll need to learn to play or write that kind of music yourself, as well as deepening your appreciation of how that kind of music works, purely as a music listener.
Listening for Layers of Musical Texture
To give another example for the exercise above, you might choose to follow the bass guitar through the whole song. Rarely does the bass take the lead in mainstream popular music, but it’s a very important element and you can normally follow it throughout the song and hear how it’s interacting with everything else that’s going on.
At that point you may even find yourself wanting to follow the exact pitches the bass is playing, and to learn to identify them by ear, or understand how they relate to the Chord Progressions. We’ll get to the Pitch dimension shortly, but the point for now is this: following one instrument throughout the song can really open up your ears to how all the layers of music are put together.
Similarly, you may even follow the drum set, or even just one drum. What is the snare doing in this song? What is the kick drum doing? What are the cymbals doing? Often, we take the percussion part for granted even though it has a huge impact on our experience of the music as a listener! Tuning in to the percussion, even dissecting it into its component parts, can quickly transform your appreciation of how important that layer of the music is.
Listening for Similarity and Contrast
Another important aspect of listening for Timbre is to think about the similarity and contrast of timbres present.
If you’re listening to classical music, you may be trying to follow the individual parts of the brass instruments, or the string instruments. In some cases that can be quite difficult, because the timbres blend together so well! For example, a viola and a violin have such similar timbre that it may be difficult to distinguish them except by listening in terms of pitch instead. So listening for one of those instruments can be quite a challenging exercise (in a good way!)
In other cases, the timbres are quite different. For example, a French horn versus the string section. If you’re following the French horn part you’re unlikely to accidentally tune in to what the strings are doing.
This same principle holds across all different kinds of music, including electronic music (by which we mean music produced by an electronic synthesiser, or a computer). Even though in that case all the music might technically be produced by one “instrument”, each synthesised sound in electronic music can be considered a different instrument with its own timbre, and so you can listen for and follow that timbre.
Listening for Roles
Electronic music is a useful genre for illustrating how listening for Timbre can help us understand musical roles.
Often in electronic music, the synthesised instruments mimic the roles of traditional acoustic instruments. So even though everything may physically be played on an electronic keyboard, you’ll likely still have a “bass part”, a part playing harmonies and chords, and a part playing melodies. You can often find these different roles through listening for the different timbres, and listening for how they work together from there.
Developing Your Ensemble Skills (Even Before You Have a Band)
One major side benefit of this kind of Timbre-based Active Listening is how much it enhances your appreciation of other instruments and how ensembles work together.
Musicians have a tendency to get laser-focused on their own instrument, particularly when we hear music—it’s our own instrument that tends to draw our attention by default.
If you’ve taken up a second, or third instrument, you’ll know what I mean! I remember vividly how within the first week or two of starting to play bass guitar, suddenly it felt like the bass parts in the music I listened to day-to-day were leaping out at me. They had always been there… but now my ears were alert to that instrument, and curious about what it was up to. The music opened up for me in a whole new way. Likewise when I started to play drums—I suddenly realised how blurry and subdued my awareness of the drum part in songs had always been before!
You can gain much the same heightened awareness simply by consciously focusing in on a certain instrument. You might like to set the intention to listen out to one instrument or role for a period (e.g. “This week I’m going to really listen out for backing vocals”) or you might like to work on increasing your awareness of all the instruments/roles at play.
By practicing Active Listening and paying attention to each instrument present and how they work together, you broaden your appreciation and understanding of the ensemble and the music as a whole. This will make you a far more capable musical collaborator in musical groups in the future. We’ll revisit this topic in Chapter 18: Performance when we discuss listening actively to other musicians when you perform together.
Questions in Mind
Here are some questions you can use to explore Instruments and Timbre.
Keep in mind that almost all questions can be asked for the whole piece of music overall, as well as for a particular instrument, a particular section, etc.
- How many different instruments can I hear?
- What instruments am I hearing? (this can be broad e.g. “strings, brass, woodwind” or specific “two violins, a viola and a cello”)
- Are there any clear groupings of the instruments, by timbre or instrument family, or by the role they’re playing in the music?
- What is the timbre of this particular instrument like? How does that compare to what’s “normal” for that instrument, is there anything distinctive about this particular timbre?
- How are the various timbres present similar to each other? How are they different?
- Is the instrumentation or the mix of timbres changing over the course of the piece? If so, how is it changing? From one section to the next section, and during each section?
- What’s the impact of instrumentation and timbre on the mood of the music? How is it being used artistically, for effect on the listener? What would this piece sound like with a particularly different instrumentation/timbre?
- What other music do I know that sounds like this, in terms of timbre? (Bonus points if you can cross genres!)
- What are the musical roles I can hear? (e.g. lead melody, rhythm section, backing harmony, countermelody, etc.) How do they correspond (or not) to the different timbres present?