Materials of Music - Timbre

The qualities we associate with different instruments including the different human voices as instruments is extremely significant for it is the nuance of subtle changes in sound that convey much of the emotion we get from a performance, and why we like this or that soloist or ensemble. It takes no training to become quite sophisticated at this since we as humans grow up and know as tiny infants what the slightest shift of tone in the voices of those around us, our parents and siblings mean, We know this long before we can speak words, as any parent is amazed to see with their youngest children. Our brains seem wired from the start to be able to decode these nuances.

Perhaps it is the intimacy of getting the world of human interaction first through our mother's own voice that equips us to know at an instant the emotional content of a beautifully sung song, and that beauty and tenderness in melody has something to do with intimate speech that we encounter throughout our lives. We also know the sinister and threatening in a similar way, and so we can pick up all emotions even though we don't understand the words being sung, as in Opera.

This is carried over into instrumental sound as these are in many way analogous to various types of voices and scoring with sung roles often reflects this. The sweet woman often has strings and often solo strings, the hero french horns and the villain the bass tuba or the clown the bassoon because of the analogy between these sounds and the character of human voices in these roles.

Richard Strauss in his tone poem Ein Heldenleben Op 40 has a solo violin dialogue with the horns representing the hero and his lady love and the passage depicts in an instrumental conversation the intimate conversation that might occur between any couple.