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Timbre 2018

Dr. Vinoo Alluri gave a research keynote in the Timbre 2018 conference held at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where she spoke about the representation of timbre in the brain. This conference was attended by major timbre and orchestration researchers from all over the world. The content of her keynote will be coming out soon in the form of a book chapter in the Springer Handbook in Auditory Research (SHAR) series.

Timbre is an important perceptual property of sound that allows us to distinguish between two different musical instruments sound different from each other, despite each instrument plays the same musical note (or when two speakers speak the same word at the same pitch we still identify it as coming from two sources). It also encapsulates the quality of sound (ex: “i like this singer because his or her voice sounds “full” (or rich/beight/round or genuine). It can also be thought of as the “color” of sound.Timbre is a vital component in music composition and production, and sound recording as artists strive to produce a certain kind of sound that best suits their music and the emotion that they are trying to convey.However, it is one of the most understudied aspects of sound and music as it is a multidimensional concept with several levels of abstraction.