From the Ruins of the Literal

'From the Ruins of the Literal,' a title borrowed from the metaphor theory of philosopher Paul Ricoeur, offers a critical perspective within the fields of organology and timbre studies, moving past the empirical, neuro-cognitive, and modernist biases that have long dominated the disciplines. Although these parameters are necessary in illuminating the full picture of instruments and timbre, they are also severely insufficient in their scope, failing to rigorously account for the poetic and affective dimensions of sounding experience, which are inherently phenomenological categories.

As such, this discussion aims to push our understanding of timbre beyond the constraints of acoustic fundamentalism, and to position it as an emergent construct (the-sound-of), as a total and autographic complex with its own time and space. To this end, alternate ways of apprehending affordance, actor-network, and dialogic interaction theories are considered, asserting deeper awareness of mediation, worldmaking, ‘thickness,’ and this-ness in the timbral experience. This discussion also seeks to expand our appreciation of meta-objects that can be encountered timbrally, which includes but is not limited to traditional musical instruments. As methodology, an embodied epistemology is underscored as the prerequisite to timbral ontology.

Perhaps the most salient conclusion that can be drawn from accepting timbre as an emergent construct is the presupposition of an iconic-symbolic and transcendent structure; an implied transition from first-order sensation to a second order of feeling, affect, meaning, and, ultimately, truth. What we arrive at, then, is less the paradox of timbre, which ethnomusicologists have correctly noted as empiricism’s inability to account for the poetic dimension of sound, but rather the irony of timbre: once we complete the cycle of timbral thinking, we inevitably arrive back in the realm of the prosaic but with our reality reconfigured and profoundly transformed.