768102

research-article2018
POM0010.1177/0305735618768102Psychology of MusicWallmark

Article

Psychology of Music

A corpus analysis of timbre

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© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0305735618768102
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735618768102
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Zachary Wallmark

Abstract
What does the common descriptive lexicon for instrumental sound tell us about how we conceptualize
musical timbre? Perceptual studies have revealed a number of verbal attributes that reliably map
onto timbral qualities, but the conventions of timbre description in spoken and written discourse
remain poorly understood. Books on orchestration provide a valuable source of natural language
about instrumental timbre. This article uses methods from corpus linguistics to explore the semantic
features of timbre through a quantitative analysis of 11 orchestration treatises and manuals.
Findings reveal a relatively constrained vocabulary for timbre: about 50 adjectives account for half
of all descriptions in the corpus. The timbre lexicon can be categorized according to affect, matter,
metaphor, mimesis, action, acoustics, and onomatopoeia, and further reduced to three latent
conceptual dimensions, which are labeled and discussed. Descriptive patterns vary systematically
by instrument and instrument family, suggesting certain regularities and consistencies to timbre
description in the orchestral tradition. This study helps test the long-held assumption that conventions
of timbre description are vague and unsystematic, and offers a cognitive linguistic account of the
timbre-language connection.

Keywords
Timbre, semantics, corpus methods, orchestration, text analysis, musicology

Verbal practices of timbre description form an enduring linguistic supplement to the orchestral
tradition. The French horn is often considered noble, the cello rich, the oboe nasal—musicians
and writers regularly call upon adjectives like these for the purposes of illustration, compari-
son, and instruction. Although commonplace, the lexicon for timbre is more unstable and
inconsistent than many other music vocabularies. As Walter Piston (1955, p. 67) put it, “adjec-
tives used to describe the tone of [an instrument] cannot do more than direct the student’s

Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, USA

Corresponding author:
Zachary Wallmark, Southern Methodist University, PO Box 750356, Dallas, TX 75275-0221, USA.
Email: zwallmark@smu.edu
2 Psychology of Music 00(0)

attention to certain admittedly general and vague attributes.” Regardless of this perceived
vagueness, semantic practices constitute a vital component in the transmission of discursive
knowledge about timbre.
Orchestration manuals and treatises offer a revealing window into the common descriptive
practices surrounding instrumental timbre in the western symphonic tradition. The current
study uses techniques from corpus linguistics to explore these semantic norms. A corpus of 11
books on orchestration was manually mined for terminology relating to timbre. This dataset of
adjectives and expressions was then subjected to statistical analysis in order to determine con-
sistencies in semantic conceptualization. What terms are most commonly used to describe
orchestral instruments? Do writers tend to use these words consistently? Are descriptive con-
ventions different from one instrument to the next? What does this lexicon reveal about timbre
cognition? Results from this text analytic approach to timbre description complement and
extend the experimental literature by investigating how authors talk about timbre in natural
language contexts.

Orchestration
It goes without saying that a deep knowledge of instrumental timbre—singularly and in com-
bination—has always been essential to orchestration. In the most influential treatise on the
topic, Hector Berlioz (1844, English translation 1882, p. 4) noted that orchestration should
include, “the study (hitherto much neglected) of the quality of tone (timbre), particular charac-
ter, and powers of expression, pertaining to each of [the instruments].” Similarly, Pierre Boulez
commented, “To understand the extent to which timbre, composition, and affectivity are linked
in the mind of the composer, one only needs to look at the musical education he has received,
and which he himself transmits [through treatises and instruction]” (Boulez, 1987, p. 162).
Since the manipulation of timbre is such a critical component to effective orchestration, the
reflections of authors of orchestration texts offer a unique window through which to view tim-
bre description in action.
The role of verbal description in orchestration is open to debate. Authors of treatises regu-
larly lament the inexact nature of timbre description. For example, Kennan and Grantham
(1952, p. 2) point out that descriptions should necessarily be considered mere aids to “aural
memory and aural imagination,” writing:

… tone colors cannot really be described adequately in words. It is all very well to read in an
orchestration book that the clarinet is “dark” in its lower register, but until the sound in question has
actually been heard and impressed on the “mind’s ear,” a student has no real conception of that
particular color …

Despite the well acknowledged imprecision in timbre description, authors nevertheless read-
ily attempt to translate instrumental sounds into words. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1933,
p. 18) was more sanguine than most about the role of timbre description in the study of orches-
tration, acknowledging the aesthetic or affective value of borrowing adjectives from other, non-
auditory senses. To Rimsky-Korsakov, timbre description was less a matter of objective labeling
than symbolic, even synesthetic transference:

It is a difficult matter to define tone quality in words; we must encroach upon the domain of sight,
feeling, and even taste. […] In using the terms thick, piercing, shrill, dry, etc. my object is to express
artistic fitness into words, rather than material exactitude.
Wallmark 3

As evidenced by the accounts above, the study of orchestration has largely been the endeavor
of composers (Erickson, 1975; Mathews, 2006) and historical musicologists (Dolan, 2012).
The topic has also been approached from empirical perspectives. In recent work, Goodchild and
McAdams (in press) analyzed common principles of orchestration from a perceptual orienta-
tion, explaining the bases for ubiquitous vernacular concepts such as “blend” through the lens
of auditory grouping principles (Bregman, 1990). Researchers have also explored the percep-
tion of blend in orchestral instrument dyads (Kendall & Carterette, 1991; Sandell, 1995).

Timbre semantics
Much of the perceptual literature on musical timbre includes an explicit or implicit linguistic
component: participants typically evaluate timbral stimuli using words, often in the form of
ratings scales, classifications, adjective checklists, free verbal responses, or interviews (for a
review, see Wallmark and Kendall, in press). Even when no explicit language task is required,
moreover, researchers often summarize statistical results by way of descriptive qualities. Indeed,
the “linguocentric predicament” (Seeger, 1977, p. 47) runs deep in timbre research; however,
despite the interrelations of timbre and semantics, relatively few studies have analyzed natural
language sources for clues about how people translate timbral percepts into words.
In a canonical observational account of the timbre-language connection, Helmholtz
(1867/1954, pp. 118–119) described musical timbres with uneven partials as hollow; strength
in higher frequencies as nasal; strong fundamental frequencies as rich; weak fundamentals as
poor; and energy in the highest partials as cutting and rough. In an early psychoacoustic study,
Lichte (1941) found that timbral percepts were consistently described in terms of brightness,
roughness, and fullness. Similarly, using a questionnaire and ratings task, Pratt and Doak (1976)
determined the primary verbal attributes for a set of synthetic tones to be dull-bright, warm-cold,
and pure-rich. Although differences in languages, methods, and stimuli make direct compari-
sons across the timbre semantics literature difficult, there is evidence that certain descriptive
practices are shared across a number of language groups and contexts (Namba et al., 1991).
Studies using clustering and principal component analysis have generated further insights
in their reduction of related descriptive adjectives to underlying semantic groupings. For exam-
ple, von Bismarck (1974) found that synthetic timbre description could be grouped into four
(German) verbal scales: dull-sharp, compact-diffuse, empty-full, and colorless-colorful. In an
English study, Kendall and Carterette (1991) reported the primary semantic dimensions of
orchestral timbres to be related to nasality, richness-brilliance, and complexity. And in a com-
parative study between English and Greek, Zacharakis, Pastiadis, and Reiss (2014, 2015) found
that orchestral timbre terminology in both languages was grouped according to luminance, tex-
ture, and mass terms. Although certain broad patterns have been observed in perceptual stud-
ies, it is unclear to what extent these results resonate with common descriptive routines for
orchestral instruments in discourse outside the lab.

Text corpus studies and timbre

Corpus analytic techniques have made significant inroads in many humanities and social sci-
ence disciplines within the last decade, including music psychology. The corpus approach is
defined by Temperley and VanHandel (2013, p. 1) as, “research involving statistical analysis of
large bodies of naturally occurring musical data.” Much of the musical data studied using cor-
pus methods is, naturally, music; that is to say, large samples of notated music (Huron, 2006),
recordings (Serrà, Corral, Boguñá, Haro, & Arcos, 2012), or song texts (Condit-Schultz, 2016;
4 Psychology of Music 00(0)

Werner, 2012). Data sources that pertain to aspects of musical behavior and reception—
including written and spoken language about music—remain understudied using these
methods.
There are a number of corpus-based precursors to this article. In a text-analytic study,
Kendall and Carterette (1993) extracted timbre descriptors from Piston’s Orchestration (1955)
and subjected them to a modified semantic differential ratings task using wind instrument
dyads as stimuli. They determined that around 91% of the variance in description could be
explained by four verbal attributes, which they labeled power, strident, plangent, and reed. Other
recent studies have leveraged the Internet to infer common semantic structures for timbre.
Analyzing a large dataset of descriptive terms (or, “social tags”) for music, Ferrer and Eerola
(2011) used latent semantic analysis to assess trends in timbre description across a broad range
of musical genres. They found 19 semantic clusters reducing to five latent factors (energetic,
intimate, classical, mellow, and cheerful), which cut across most genres and could be explained by
a relatively small set of acoustic features.

Study aim
There were three main goals of the present study. The first goal was to statistically summarize a
representative sample of the written discourse on orchestral timbre. What descriptive vocabu-
lary is commonly used to characterize the sound of different instruments in the orchestral con-
text? The related second goal, using statistical inference, was to determine whether this
vocabulary reflects a consistent and systematic set of semantic strategies. Are there differences
between descriptive schemas for individual instruments, for example, or between instrument
families? Many writers over the years have assumed that words for timbre are whimsical, sub-
jective, and somewhat arbitrary—this study will put that assumption to the test by hypothesiz-
ing that, to the contrary, timbre description in orchestration treatises reflects shared and
relatively consistent verbal conventions that resonate with results from the timbre perception
literature. And, finally, as a window into the cognitive linguistic underpinnings of timbre
description, the third goal was to explore the latent conceptual structures of the corpus through
an inductive process of semantic categorization. What does the common vocabulary for instru-
mental sound, as revealed in the corpus, tell us about how the mind makes sense of timbre?
Influenced by conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999), music theorists
have proposed a number of compelling models relating music vocabulary and concepts—for
example, pitch height (Cox, 2016; Zbikowski, 2002), musical motion (Johnson & Larson,
2003), and “musical forces” (Larson, 2012)—to cognitive semantic structures. This article
proposes that such conceptual structuring may undergird timbre description as well.
Timbre—the multidimensional attribute of auditory perception that allows us to distinguish
one source from another when all other acoustic variables are kept constant—is notoriously
difficult to study (for reviews, see Hajda, Kendall, Carterette, & Harshberger, 1997; McAdams,
1993). The present article aims to shed additional light on the “problem of timbre” through a
corpus-based investigation of its semantic dimensions.

Methods
Data
The corpus analyzed in this study consisted of 11 treatises and manuals on orchestration and
instrumentation published between 1844 and 2009 (see Table 1). Although not exhaustive,
Wallmark 5

Table 1.  The corpus.

Author Title Pub. year Token f  % Type f  CTTR

Adler, S. The Study of Orchestration 1989 316 8.6 145 5.8
Berlioz, H. A Treatise on Modern 1882 650 17.7 305 8.5
Instrumentation and
Orchestration
Blatter, A. Instrumentation and Orchestration 1980 349 9.5 139 5.3
Brant, H. Textures and Timbres: An 2009 174 4.7 55 3
Orchestrator’s Handbook
Forsyth, C. Orchestration 1914 471 12.8 268 8.7
Jacob, G. Orchestral Technique: A Manual 1931 201 5.5 127 6.3
for Students
Kennan, K. & The Technique of Orchestration 1952 425 11.6 181 6.2
Grantham, D.
Piston, W. Orchestration 1955 328 8.9 164 6.4
Rimsky-Korsakov, N. Principles of Orchestration 1933 289 7.9 111 4.6
Wagner, J. Orchestration: A Practical 1959 241 6.6 144 6.6
Handbook
Widor, C-M. The Technique of the Modern 1906 222 6.1 116 5.5
Orchestra: A Manual of Practical
Instrumentation
M 333 9.1 160 6.1
SD 139 3.8 71 1.6
TOTAL 3666 100 879 10.3

The corpus consisted of 11 books. Frequencies listed are for timbre-related terminology only. Note: Token f refers to
the total frequency of timbre descriptors in each source (including repetitions); % is the percentage of the total corpus
represented by each source; type f is the frequency of unique descriptors in each text (i.e., the number of individual de-
scriptors without repetition); and CTTR is the corrected type-token ratio, a common index of lexical diversity (Carroll,
1964). See text for details.

the corpus represents arguably the most widespread and influential texts on the subject, includ-
ing the first modern orchestration treatise (Berlioz, 1882; Berlioz & Strauss, 1948/1991) as
well as books commonly used today in college-level composition and orchestration classes (e.g.,
Adler, 1989).1 Three general inclusion criteria were taken into account when selecting books
for analysis: (a) English-language or translated-into-English sources, (b) a history of pedagogi-
cal and practical use in the Anglophone world, and (c) sources specific to the symphony
orchestra.

Method of data collection

Because common terminology for timbre is often ambiguous and context-dependent, descrip-
tive words were extracted manually by the author and two musically trained graduate research
assistants. Repetitions, quotations from other authors, tessitura information (low, middle, or
high register), and specific playing techniques (col legno strings, brass mutes, etc.) were all noted
and included in the dataset, and words were tabulated by instrument, instrument family, and
various blends. Intensifiers (very) and negations (not x) were omitted; explicitly acoustic descrip-
tions were also excluded from analysis.2
6 Psychology of Music 00(0)

Most importantly, special care was taken to avoid the inclusion of adjectives that cross-map
with other musical domains in passages that do not specifically refer to timbre, including terms
that can apply equally to pitch (deep, low), dynamics (soft, big), rhythm and articulation (punctu-
ated, crisp), and texture (thick, sparse). To be sure, timbre covaries with pitch and dynamics, so it
could be argued that this separation is a false one (McAdams & Goodchild, 2017). Many authors
specify these covariates when describing timbre; however, a good many passages in the corpus
either omit this information or provide inadequate context to accurately evaluate it. For the
sake of the present study, therefore, a fairly conservative extraction method was employed.
There were still many ambiguous cases, which were discussed and resolved among the author
and the two assistants. To illustrate some typical instances of timbre description and corre-
sponding extraction methodology, consider the following randomly selected examples (with
included words in bold and excluded words in italics):

1. “[Cello] timbre, on the upper strings [range-high], is one of the most expressive in the
orchestra. Nothing is more voluptuously melancholy, or more suited to the utterance
of tender, languishing themes[pitch].” (Berlioz, 1882, p. 37)
2. “[The tambourine is] capable of splash-color effects at all dynamic levels[loudness].”
(Wagner, 1959, p. 262)
3. “The quality of the notes [on stopped French horn[technique]] varies from a savage bark
like that of a wild animal to the dull uncertain sound with which a rout-seat
scrapes over a parquet-floor.” (Forsyth, 1914, p. 113)
4. “The very deep notes[range-low] of the double bassoon are remarkably thick and dense in
quality, very powerful in piano passages[loudness].” (Rimsky-Korsakov, 1933, p. 20)
5. “All are in sixth position [on the violin], except that the initial B is better played on the
more brilliant E-string in third position.” (Piston, 1955, p. 50)

Following the extraction process, raw wordlist data were analyzed using AntConc software
(Anthony, 2014). Lemma (i.e., canonical or dictionary) forms of all descriptors were specified
in order to avoid duplications, including the transformation of adverbial, verbal derivations,
and nominal forms to adjectives (for example, the tokens brightness, brightly, brighter, and
brighten were all subsumed under the lemma bright). A stop-list filtered all irrelevant lexical
content (particles, conjunctions, etc.).

Results
The extraction procedure resulted in 3666 total timbre descriptions (tokens), of which 879
(types) were unique. In addition to standard statistical procedures, the rest of this paper will
employ a few basic measures common in corpus linguistic analysis (Gries, 2010). Tokens refer
to the total frequency of observed timbre descriptors in a given dataset; % indicates the percent-
age of the total corpus represented by a given variable; and types are the unique observed
descriptors within a given dataset.
As an index of lexical diversity—i.e., the relative level of redundancy or novelty of word
choice—linguists often use a type-token ratio (TTR), or ratio of unique words to the total word
count. For comparisons of uneven sample sizes, Carroll (1964) proposed a corrected TTR
(CTTR) consisting of the ratio of type to the square root of two times the token frequency.3
Lower relative scores thus indicate consistency/redundancy in descriptive vocabulary, while
higher scores indicate breadth/diversity of word choice. Taken as a whole, the approximate
lexical diversity for the corpus is high, CTTR = 10.3. Furthermore, we can see that lexical
Wallmark 7

Table 2.  Top 50 timbre descriptors.

Descriptor Rank Frequency % Descriptor Rank Frequency

(cont’d) (all < 1%)
brilliant 1 112 3.1 thick 19 26
rich 2 98 2.7 open 20 24
dark 3 84 2.3 deep 21 23
full 4 71 2.0 sweet 21 23
bright 5 65 1.8 round 22 22
nasal 6 61 1.7 weak 22 22
clear 7 58 1.6 biting 23 21
sonorous 8 55 1.5 expressive 23 21
thin 8 55 1.5 hollow 23 21
penetrating 9 50 1.4 melancholic 23 21
soft 10 45 1.3 somber 23 21
dry 11 44 1.2 voice-like 23 21
warm 12 43 1.2 flute-like 24 20
mellow 13 41 1.1 rough 24 20
piercing 13 41 1.1 pure 25 19
powerful 13 41 1.1 intense 26 18
hard 14 36 1.0 strong 26 18
dull 15 34 <1 veiled 26 18
noble 15 34 <1 charming 27 17
resonant 15 34 <1 incisive 27 17
metallic 16 30 <1 light 27 17
heavy 17 28 <1 brittle 28 15
reedy 17 28 <1 mysterious 28 15
shrill 17 28 <1 sharp 28 15
smooth 18 27 <1 bell-like 29 14

diversity is negatively correlated with year of publication, r(9) = –.70, p < .02, indicating that
richness of vocabulary for timbre in orchestration texts has diminished over time. This histori-
cal trend is likely attributable in part to the aesthetic values of 19th-century musical romanti-
cism, which tended to valorize poetic subjectivity and extra-musical, often literary themes
(Berlioz was a foundational architect of program music). It should perhaps come as no surprise,
then, that earlier authors exhibited a more expansive descriptive palette in characterizing
timbre.
The 50 most frequent timbre descriptors are displayed in Table 2. Corroborating the high
corpus-level CTTR value, results indicated a right-skewed, “long tail” distribution of word
types: the most frequent descriptor, brilliant, occurs 112 times, although it only accounts for
3.1% of the corpus. The mean frequency of each descriptor is 4.51 (SD = 9.89), with 12% of
the corpus consisting of words that occur only once (referred to as hapax legomena). In con-
trast, the top 50 words alone account for 49% of the corpus. This kind of skewed frequency
distribution is roughly consistent with Zipf ’s principle of least effort in natural language
use, which states that the usage frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank
in the frequency table (Baayen, 1992; Zipf, 1935). Thus, the lexicon of timbre description is
diverse from an absolute standpoint due to a high proportion of words that appear only a
few times.
8 Psychology of Music 00(0)

Table 3.  Descriptors by instrument family.

Woodwinds Brass Strings Percussion

Token f 1140 688 869 437
% 32 19 24 12
Type f 407 270 343 214
CTTR 8.5 7.3 8.2 7.2
Top 10 descriptors rich, thin, dark, brilliant, full, nasal, rich, brilliant, dry, bright,
bright, brilliant, noble, powerful, sonorous, soft, dark, resonant, brittle,
piercing, nasal, rich, dark, bright, dull, dry, warm, hollow, brilliant,
clear, full, brassy, open flute-like, noble hard, deep, metallic,
penetrating clear

Note: The woodwind group consisted of data for nine individual instruments plus the full section and blends between
woodwinds; brass consisted of four instruments plus section and blends; strings for four instruments plus section and
blends; and percussion for 37 instruments plus piano. Descriptors listed in ascending rank order (1–10).

After generation of the master list, data were subdivided by instrument family and by indi-
vidual instrument. The following will focus only on the 17 primary non-percussive instruments
of the modern orchestra, though terms for percussion and more obscure instruments (e.g.,
ophicleide, basset horn) were included in the complete dataset.
As shown in Table 3, vocabulary grouped by instrument family reveals a good deal of redun-
dancy, with many of the top 10 or so words from the master list (e.g., brilliant, rich) reshuffled
for each of the families. High CTTR measures betoken the breadth of descriptive options avail-
able to writers at the family level, which is intuitive given the timbral diversity of each group.
The possible exception here would seem to be the more homogeneous strings; one might expect
violin and viola, for example, to be described in similar terms, though this appears not to be the
case, with roughly the same level of diversity in the strings as the other families (CTTR = 8.2).
Despite similar CTTR measures, in absolute terms woodwinds were the best represented in the
corpus (f = 1140).
Table 4 displays frequency, diversity, and top 10 descriptors for each instrument. The clarinet
was the most frequently described woodwind (f = 245) and also had the highest lexical diversity
(CTTR = 6.6); among the brass family, this distinction went to the horn (f = 201), though the
trombone showed greatest diversity (CTTR = 6.6). It is worth noting that many instruments are
described using opposing, even contradictory terms: for example, the clarinet is frequently
described as both rich/dark and brilliant/piercing depending on register. The lack of tessitura
specificity in the lists below is an important factor driving some of this bipolarity; indeed, the
results here collapse these perceptual distinctions for the sake of indexing simply the most com-
mon semantic correlates of the “constrained universe of timbres” available to each instrument
(McAdams & Goodchild, 2017, p. 129).

Categorization
Given the high variability in vocabulary, it is difficult to assess semantic norms from wordlist
data alone. To investigate the conceptual groupings that characterize the dataset, therefore,
categories were generated by the author through an inductive sorting process based on the
complete set of timbre descriptors (including hapax legomena), then corroborated through an
inter-rater agreement procedure (for more on this method see Slingerland & Chudek, 2011).
In order to preserve the independence of each categorical variable for later statistical testing,
Wallmark 9

Table 4.  Descriptors by selected instruments.

Piccolo Flute Oboe

Token f 92 179 159

% of WW 8 16 14
Type f 58 106 88
CTTR 4.3 5.6 4.9
Top 10 descriptors piercing, bright, weak, brilliant, clear, bright, nasal, thin, penetrating,
whistling, brilliant, breathy, sweet, pungent, coarse, reedy,
shrill, breathy, clear, shrill, velvety, light, thick, artless, clear,
edgy, feeble penetrating, pure joyous

  English horn Clarinet (B♭/A) Bass clarinet

Token f 87 245 59
% of WW 8 21 5
Type f 61 145 45
CTTR 4.6 6.6 4.1
Top 10 descriptors melancholic, rich, dark, rich, dark, brilliant, rich, dark, full,
expressive, sonorous, piercing, clear, warm, goblinesque, shadowy,
thin, beautiful, deep, bright, noble, pure, sinister, windy, bright,
dreamy, poignant shrill calm, characteristic

  Bassoon Contrabassoon Saxophone (A/T)

Token f 143 42 73
% of WW 13 4 6
Type f 100 30 50
CTTR 5.9 3.3 4.1
Top 10 descriptors thin, nasal, dark, rough, ponderous, full, rich, horn-like,
dry, pinched, full, buzzing, deep, full, good, open, even, flute-like,
pale, reedy, weak, heavy, nasal, thick, heavy, penetrating,
cadaverous dense sentimental, thick

  Horn Trumpet Trombone Tuba

Token f 201 144 178 79
% of brass 29 21 26 11
Type f 104 82 125 51
CTTR 5.2 4.8 6.6 4.1
Top 10 noble, brassy, nasal, brilliant, full, powerful, full, brilliant, smooth, powerful,
descriptors rich, brilliant, dark, noble, penetrating, powerful, noble, nasal, round, brilliant, heavy,
dull, full, warm, piercing, assertive, penetrating, rich, dark, horn-like, full, mellow,
distant bright, clear solid, sonorous obtrusive, open

  Violin Viola Cello Double bass

Token f 237 114 117 112
% of strings 31 13 13 13
Type f 138 71 74 95
CTTR 5.9 4.7 4.8 6.4
Top 10 sonorous, brilliant, dark, rich, somber, rich, sonorous, voice-like, dark, dry, dull,
descriptors soft, dull, noble, rich, melancholic, nasal, warm, deep, expressive, lugubrious, rich, buzzing,
biting, clear, hard, penetrating, piercing, full, mysterious, poetic, dignified, gloomy,
mournful reedy, thick, antique smooth grumbling, ponderous

Note: Descriptors consist of all ranges, dynamics, and auxiliary playing techniques for each instrument. Descriptors listed
in ascending rank order (1–10).
10 Psychology of Music 00(0)

each word was sorted according to its single category of best fit, although secondary and
tertiary categories were noted. Close consideration of category membership also led to a
reduction of the original dataset, as redundancies were eliminated (token f = 3571, type
f = 792).
Inductive categorization resulted in seven basic conceptual groupings of timbre descriptors,
described below. Inter-rater reliability analysis was then performed to determine the validity of
this categorization schema. Three musically trained raters were given brief descriptions of the
a priori categories; they then independently sorted the top 50 words into the categories. Cohen’s
kappa (κ) was computed for each of the six coder pairs then averaged to provide a single index
of agreement (Light, 1971). Kappa scores ranged between .60 and .79, with a mean score of
κ = .68, p < .001. Although it must be acknowledged that the inference of conceptual catego-
ries from text corpus data is notoriously difficult and disagreement is inevitable, according to
common interpretive practices this represents substantial agreement. Following reliability
analysis, therefore, the seven-category typology was considered “final” and descriptive statis-
tics were computed.
I have labeled the seven basic categories of timbre descriptors as follows (from most frequent
to least): (a) Affect, (b) Matter, (c) Cross-modal correspondence (CMC), (d) Mimesis, (e) Action, (f)
Acoustics, and (g) Onomatopoeia. To briefly define these categories, with examples (in bold):

1. Affect: Words that refer to emotional and aesthetic properties of timbre, generally con-
sisting of affectively valenced, evaluative, contrastive adjectives. Examples: mellow,
noble, grotesque, gloomy, powerful, attractive, fine
•• “… nothing can equal the charm of the upper register [of the oboe d’amore].”
(Widor, 1906, p. 26)

2. Matter: Words that describe features of physical matter; i.e. objects or substances with
weight, mass, shape, etc. Examples: thin, round, hollow, liquid, sharp, blunt, heavy
•• “In the lower register [the horn] is dark and brilliant; round and full in the upper.”
(Rimsky-Korsakov, 1933, p. 24)

3. CMC: Words borrowed cross-modally from other senses, encompassing an embodied

conceptual transfer process by which an auditory target domain (timbre) is understood
in reference to a non-auditory source domain (vision, touch, taste, smell) (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1999). This category can be further subdivided by sense modality. Examples:
bright, warm, sweet, smooth, dark, coarse, sparkling
•• “[These cello notes are] rough, harsh, incongruous, and uncertain…” (Widor,
1906, p. 176)

4. Mimesis: Words that describe timbre metaphorically by way of comparison to other

things, including direct sonic resemblance as well as more impressionist, poetic corre-
spondences;  i.e. it “sounds like” x, where x can be another instrument, the voice, nature,
etc.4 Examples: Flutey (flute-like), nasal, bell-like, throaty, growling, stormy, fairy-like
•• “[The violin is] the true female voice of the orchestra…” (Berlioz, 1882, p. 25)

This category might be divided into four general subcategories: Vocal terms (hoarse,
breathy); instrument terms (gong-like, oboe-like); natural/weather sounds (thundering,
Wallmark 11

windy), and poetic simile (sound “such as might come from a ghost if it had a pip in its
throat”).

5. Action: Words describing physical actions or qualities of movement; i.e. sounds that act
in certain ways or were produced through specific actions of the performer. This group
often takes the form of verbal adjectives, but also frequently describes elements of per-
formance technique (e.g., a pinched sound as the result of a pinched embouchure).
Examples: Piercing, biting, lamenting, strained, mocking, muffled
•• “The characteristic sound of a trumpet with a fully assembled Harmon mute is pen-
etrating and has a real shimmer.” (Adler, 1989, p. 278)
6. Acoustics: Words referring to specific auditory properties and/or the spatial contexts of
sound production. Examples: Ringing, shrill, raspy, blaring, resonant, echoing, clangorous
•• “[Orchestra bells] will produce a beautifully sonorous and solemn [timbre]…”
(Forsyth, 1914, p. 55)

7. Onomatopoeia: Words that phonetically resemble the sounds they describe, either in lexi-
cal forms (buzz) or through vocables (/doo-ah/). Example: Click, hiss, rattle, ping, screech,
cluck, honk
•• “The quality of tone in pizzicato [can sound like] a twanging of such violence…”
(Piston, 1955, p. 24)

Table 5 lists the top-ranked words for each conceptual category. Confirming intuition, affec-
tive descriptions are the most frequent (35.5% of corpus): composers often use timbre to convey
specific affective intentions, and timbre has long been considered a “sign-post for the emotions”
in symphonic music (Boulez, 1987, p. 163). This category also contains the highest diversity of
the seven (CTTR = 7.2), perhaps reflecting its more subjective character. In contrast, CMC and

Table 5.  Seven categories of timbre description with top 10 words in each.

rank Affect Matter CMC Mimesis Action Acoustics Onomat.

1 rich full brilliant nasal penetrating sonorous buzzing
2 mellow thin dark voice-like piercing resonant rattling
3 powerful dry bright flute-like open shrill clicking
4 noble hard clear bell-like biting distant pinging
5 weak metallic soft horn-like threatening ringing sizzling
6 expressive heavy warm oboe-like lamenting echoing clanging
7 melancholic reedy dull breathy pinched high crackling
8 somber thick smooth whistling agile strident hissing
9 pure deep sweet trumpet-like focused loud honking
10 intense round rough whispering strained raspy rustling
Token f 1268 697 688 391 284 193 70
% 35.5 19.5 19.3 10.9 8 5.4 2
Type f 364 97 62 139 67 28 32
CTTR 7.2 2.6 1.7 5 2.8 1.4 2.7
12 Psychology of Music 00(0)

Figure 1.  Cluster analysis of categorizations by instrument.

acoustic descriptions appear to have a much more constrained lexicon (CTTR < 2), likely driven
by the preponderance of just a few words within each category. Onomatopoeia represents the
least frequent conceptual type (2% of corpus), with most of its observations driven by a small
handful of instruments, especially percussion. There is a likely cultural component to the pau-
city of onomatopoeia: writers may have been reluctant to describe the timbral repertory of the
august symphony orchestra using such “wild” terminology, even in “tamer” lexical forms
(Rhodes, 1994). In other musical communities—for instance, the vocabulary prevalent among
professional sound engineers in popular music (Porcello, 2004)—onomatopoeia figures much
more prominently.
As a first exploratory step, a hierarchical cluster analysis of category membership for the
instruments was performed. The analysis employed a farthest neighbor clustering method
using chi-squared measures for categorical data (Figure 1). Intriguingly, for the most part this
clustering procedure revealed natural groupings organized by family and consistent with intui-
tion: clarinet and bass clarinet clustered together, as did flute and piccolo, oboe and bassoon,
and so forth. This result is consistent with the factor analysis of Wedin and Goude (1972), who
found that instrument description is classified according to family membership. However, some
unexpected pairs cluster together in the lower branches, including saxophone with tuba, and
horn with double bass. It would seem that descriptive lexicons common to certain instruments
are more independent of family membership than others: saxophone and tuba are both fre-
quently described as heavy, a term that does not appear in the top-ten rankings of any other
woodwinds (with one exception) or brass. Moreover, the bottommost stems, rather than being
organized by family, appear to be grouped according to the prevalence of terms such as dark,
rich, deep, and other conceptually related matter and CMC vocabulary.
Next, in order to determine whether the frequency of descriptors for instrument families and
individual instruments was associated with the conceptual categories beyond the level of
chance, a log-linear analysis was performed. Log-linear models are a special case of the GLM
designed to predict the frequency of categorical outcomes as a function of a linear combination
of independent variables, similar to an ANOVA but for “count” instead of interval data
(Anderton & Cheney, 2004). The test revealed significant main effects of instrument family and
category membership, as well as two-way interactions, χ2(42) = 4953, p < .001. To further
Wallmark 13

Figure 2.  Instrument family description in relation to average mean frequency of family categorizations.

investigate these effects, separate chi-squared tests were performed to determine the level of
association between the four instrument families and each of the seven categories. There was a
significant association between instrument family and affect, χ2(3) = 21.08, p < .001, Cramer’s
V = .09; matter, χ2(3) = 12.19, p < .01, V = .07; mimesis, χ2(3) = 9.43, p < .02, V = .06; acous-
tics, χ2(3) = 19.78, p < .001, V = .09; and onomatopoeia, χ2(3) = 108.55, p < .001, V = .20.
CMC and action were not significantly associated with instrument family. Figure 2 displays the
percentage difference from mean category frequency used to describe each instrument family.
Instrument family membership thus appeared to have a systematic effect on category of
verbal attributes. To find out whether frequency distributions of the descriptive categories dif-
fered between individual instruments, 15 instruments with a token frequency greater than 65
(or 1 SD = 60 below the mean f of 125) were included in another log-linear analysis. (Bass clari-
net and contrabassoon were omitted based on this criterion). As with the instrument families,
the model indicated significant main effects of instrument and categories along with two-way
interactions, χ2(119) = 3622, p < .001. Chi-squared tests indicated that all instruments exhib-
ited statistically significant associations with membership in the seven categories, M
χ2(14) = 27.58, p < .02, Cramer’s V > .12, with the exception of matter, χ2(14) = 22.99, p = .06.
This suggests that variation in the description of orchestral instruments is not distributed in
equal proportions among the seven conceptual categories, but rather reflects certain estab-
lished conventions in timbre semantics that remain relatively consistent throughout the
corpus.
As illustrated in Figure 3, each instrument has a unique descriptive profile relative to the
others in its family. For instance, among the woodwinds (Figure 3(a)), the clarinet basically
conforms to the categorical frequency distribution of the corpus; however, the contrabassoon is
described with significantly more matter and onomatopoeia terms, and fewer affect and meta-
phor words than average. As a family, the woodwinds exhibited a greater variation in
14 Psychology of Music 00(0)

Figure 3.  Instrument description in relation to average mean frequency of instrument categorizations (by
family). (a) Woodwinds. (b) Brass. (c) Strings.
Wallmark 15

Table 6.  Principle component analysis by conceptual category.

Category Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3

Onomatopoeia .88 −.19 −.02
Matter .74 −.49 −.25
CMC −.09 .87 .08
Acoustics −.20 .64 −.15
Mimesis .07 −.30 .73
Action −.19 .14 .79
Affect –.65 −.42 –.61
Variance accounted for 32.9% 25.1% 16.1%

Results of principle component analysis (PCA) using Varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization. All eigenvalues > 1;
combined total variance explained was 74.1%. Large positive factor loadings (> .50) indicated in bold, significant negative
loadings (< –.50) indicated in italics.

differences from mean category frequency than the others (as indicated here by larger x-axis
scales in Figure 3(a)). Among the brass (Figure 3(b)), the trombone is described with a higher
percentage of terms for affect and mimesis (mainly vocal) than the rest of the instruments.
String description (Figure 3(c)), on the other hand, is fairly uniformly affect-driven.
Finally, a principle component analysis (PCA) was performed to determine whether any
latent conceptual groupings structured the category results. Count data were converted to
ratios for input, and sampling adequacy was confirmed (Bartlett). Varimax rotation generated
three factors with eigenvalues >1. As shown in Table 6, these three factors accounted for 74.1%
of total variance: Factor 1 (32.9%) loaded positively onto matter and onomatopoeia, versus the
negatively loaded affect; Factor 2 (25.1%) consisted of positive loadings on CMC and acoustics;
and Factor 3 (16.1%) loaded positively on mimesis and action, also with a strong negative load-
ing on affect. Interestingly, affect—the most frequent descriptive category—loaded negatively
onto all factors, indicating a strong inverse relationship between the frequency of affective
descriptions of timbre and the major groupings revealed by the PCA.

Discussion
This article explored three main questions regarding timbre description in a corpus of orches-
tration books: (a) What words are the most frequently used to describe qualities of instrumental
timbre? (b) Are descriptive conventions actually different from one instrument to the next? And
(c) What does this lexicon reveal about timbre conceptualization and cognition more
generally?
Beginning with the first, descriptive, goal of this study, it was found that timbre words
are characterized by a Zipfian distribution (Zipf, 1935): a small subset of terms accounted
for a large percentage of all utterances about timbre. The most frequent 50 words com-
prised around half of the corpus, while 12% consisted of hapax legomena (words that only
occur once). Each descriptor appeared on average only 4.51 times in the corpus.
Interpretation for this result must remain ambivalent. In absolute terms, the lexicon of
timbre for orchestral instruments is varied and diverse, reflecting a rich repertory of
descriptive strategies. On the other hand, this pool is for the most part shallow: a small
handful of words account for the lion’s share of actual language use. We might conclude
that while there exists a great deal of poetic latitude in timbre description, most of the time
16 Psychology of Music 00(0)

this extensive verbal inventory is untapped. There are likely cultural and historical expla-
nations for this trend: as noted previously, lexical diversity in orchestration treatises has
decreased markedly from the florid writing of Berlioz to the stark descriptions of more
recent authors. The gradual standardization of timbre vocabulary may also be due to a
broader reorientation beginning in the late 19th century away from the values of musical
romanticism and toward psychoacoustic definitions of timbre (see Wallmark & Kendall, in
press).
Considering that English contains tens of thousands of adjectives, moreover, we might con-
versely ask ourselves why a paltry 800 or so verbal types suffice to comprise the entirety of the
timbre lexicon in this corpus. Seen from this perspective, if timbre description is largely arbi-
trary and subjective, why was there not even greater diversity? (Admittedly, the opposite inter-
pretation could also be drawn from this, with descriptive vagueness manifesting as lower lexical
diversity as authors recycle the same small vocabulary to describe different instruments.) Either
way, the simple fact that certain common English adjectives were absent in this corpus (e.g.,
diplomatic) while others were robustly present (bright) is evidence that some descriptors are
viewed as better fits than others, resulting in a relatively high degree of consistency among
authors. In future studies, it would be interesting to see if the spoken discourse about timbre
reflects this same general pattern. To be sure, orchestration treatises are the products of profes-
sional musicians; it is not clear the extent to which other discursive communities may employ
similar norms in timbre description.
This result also suggests that timbre semantics is constrained by certain discrete conceptual
schemas, which were explored through an inductive categorization procedure. These seven cat-
egories confirm and extend results from the timbre perception literature. In a sound retrieval
study, Wake and Asahi (1998) identified three main descriptive strategies, naming the sound
itself, sounding situations, and sound impressions. Sarkar, Vercoe, and Yang (2007) similarly pro-
posed three types of timbre descriptions, material properties, sensory modalities other than hearing,
and subjective impressions. Furthermore, Zacharakis et al. (2014, 2015) identified the three
semantic factors of luminance, texture, and mass to explain a large proportion of variance in
timbre description. Though the taxonomies above varied in stimuli, language, and methods,
the present result would seem to largely support these broad schemas while also adding seman-
tic granularity to them. This approximate convergence suggests that the descriptive routines
outlined here may be active in musical “talk and text” beyond that of the symphony orchestra,
and might characterize a broader swath of the discursive landscape for musical timbre in many
linguistic and cultural contexts.
Second, we can infer from the distribution of words among the seven categories that each
instrument family and individual instrument (with a couple exceptions) has a strong associa-
tion with the seven categories. This helps resolve whether there is a systematic relationship
between certain types of descriptors and the instruments thus described: if timbre words were
randomly distributed and the categories applied equally well to all instruments—e.g., the oboe
was just as likely to be labeled noble (an affect word) as the French horn—we would expect all
instruments to be described using similar proportions of each. This is not the case, confirming
the hypothesis that variation in timbre semantics is likely systematic, and related to instrument
and instrument family.
Finally, this study has implications for our understanding of the cognitive linguistics of tim-
bre. PCA revealed a grouping of timbre terminology into three latent semantic dimensions. To
visualize these relationships, Figure 4 plots the locations of the categories in a three-dimen-
sional conceptual space. The first dimension loads positively onto onomatopoeia and matter,
with a negative loading on affect. It could be argued that the two categories that exemplify this
Wallmark 17

Figure 4.  Three-dimensional model of orchestral timbre conceptualization.

dimension reduce to an underlying conceptual schema that taps into the materiality of sound
production; thus, we might label it the Material dimension of timbre description. This dimen-
sion relies upon a conceptualization of instrumental timbre as both the sound of material
things (onomatopoeia, which foregrounds the ecological contingencies of sound production
through phonetic imitation), as well as the physical properties of sounding materials them-
selves (matter).
The second dimension, which is driven by positive loadings on CMC and acoustics, appears
to be associated with sensory impressions both from the auditory environment and through
non-auditory senses, particularly vision and touch. We could therefore label this the Sensory
dimension, which is grounded in a conceptualization of timbre as cross-modal sensory percep-
tion. As Rimsky-Korsakov evinced, synesthetic adjectives for timbre are pervasive. In a behav-
ioral study, Eitan and Rothschild (2010) reported tactile associations with a number of musical
parameters, including pitch height, loudness, and timbre. The prevalence of cross-modal adjec-
tives in timbre description might be accounted for by way of conceptual metaphor theory: as
originally posited by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), we often make sense of abstract target domains
through reference to concrete source domains (e.g., conceptualizing romantic relationships as
journeys, as revealed in expressions such as “it’s been a long and bumpy road”). Conceptual
metaphor theory has been applied fruitfully to a range of non-timbral musical dimensions (Cox,
2016; Larson, 2012; Zbikowski, 2002): the present result suggests that it also may be extended
to timbre conceptualization. In addition to historical and cultural factors in timbre description,
then, cognitive semantic constraints may influence which terms appear to fit a given timbral
percept and which are considered incongruent.
Lastly, the third dimension loads onto action and mimesis. These categories are united by
what we might label as Activity, which captures a crucial verbal (as compared to adjectival)
component to timbre. Activity terms highlight the physical contingencies that go into the
18 Psychology of Music 00(0)

production and perception of sound (action), as well as the resemblances we actively project
onto them (mimesis). As pointed out by Fales (2002), timbre is often considered what a sound
is; in contrast, the Activity dimension captures what a sound does. Taken together, conceptual
groundings in Material, Sensory, and Activity dimensions may be interpreted to support an
embodied, ecological theory of timbre perception and cognition (Wallmark, Iacoboni, Deblieck,
& Kendall, 2018).
There are a number of limitations to this study. First, manual extraction of timbre descrip-
tions was admittedly cumbersome and prone to ambiguity. This was arguably necessary, how-
ever, until more precise learning algorithms can be used to automate the process. Additionally,
linguistic and stimuli context was not considered (e.g., the oboe is nasal compared with the clari-
net). Next, this study did not take into account the process of historical influence that undeni-
ably affected word choice among these texts, which may confound in unpredictable ways the
sampling assumptions upon which these statistical analyses were based. And finally, this study
did not account for covarying musical domains in analyses of word frequency by instrument. A
greater focus on the long-neglected role of tessitura and dynamics in timbre description prom-
ises to enliven future research.

Conclusion
This article used corpus-analytic methods to explore the conventions of timbre description in
orchestration books. Drawing on a frequency of over 3600 timbre terms extracted from 11
texts, the study found that around half of all descriptions of instrumental sound used the same
50 words. Terms could be grouped into seven semantic categories: affect, matter, cross-modal
correspondence, mimesis, action, acoustics, and onomatopoeia. The relative proportion of
vocabulary from each of these categories varied systematically by instrument family and indi-
vidual instrument. Furthermore, PCA revealed three semantic factors that conceptually
ground timbre description in Material, Sensory, and Activity dimensions.
The current findings have important implications for the psychological and humanistic
study of musical timbre (McAdams, 1993), orchestration (Dolan, 2012; Goodchild & McAdams,
in press), and the cognitive linguistics of music (Johnson, 2007). Methodologically, this study
demonstrated the novel analytical potential of using natural language data, as acquired
through large text corpora, to explore issues in timbre perception and cognition typically
approached using methods from experimental psychology (cf. Ferrer & Eerola, 2011; Kendall &
Carterette, 1993). In showing certain linguistic consistencies in timbre description that com-
plement the experimental literature, these findings could have implications for the development
of music information retrieval systems (Leman, 2007) and computer music interfaces
(Gounaropoulos & Johnson, 2006). Moreover, this approach could be used to quantitatively
investigate other topics related to musical discourse within the fields of music psychology, his-
torical musicology, and ethnomusicology.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Stephen McAdams and Roger Kendall for their helpful comments on an earlier draft
of this article. I also wish to thank my graduate research assistants at the SMU MuSci Lab, Jessica Pinkham
and Andrew Penney.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Wallmark 19

Notes
1. Both an early English translation of the Berlioz (1882, trans. M. C. Clarke) and the Strauss revision
(1904, in mid-century Dover imprint, trans. T. Front) were analyzed. To avoid duplication of entries,
only the 1882 version was added to the corpus. Descriptive terminology between the two editions
is substantially similar: Strauss’s revisions primarily involved an expansion of excerpted and ana-
lyzed passages—largely to account for developments in late-romantic German orchestration—not to
timbre-relevant descriptive passages. For a copy of the dataset, please contact the author.
2. For example, Adler speaks with great acoustical specificity about certain instruments, including a
discussion of the harmonic series and how certain performance techniques drive energy into specific
harmonic partials: see Adler (1989, pp. 46–47). I chose to exempt empirically derived accounts of
timbre from the corpus in order to focus on the perceptual and cognitive bases of timbre description
as revealed in impressionistic, affective descriptions. Reporting on spectral features of a timbre is
largely objective; in this study I am more interested in the interpretive vocabulary employed to make
sense of instrumental timbre.
types
3. CTTR =
2∗ tokens
4. Subsequent examples of mimesis will use the format “x-like” to indicate all comparisons, even when
the authors of the text did not explicitly state it in this way. For example, vocal and like a voice would
both be subsumed under the lemma form voice-like. Additionally, it should be mentioned that inter-
instrument comparison formed a central descriptive scheme for Brant (2009), who subsumed the
timbre of instruments and groupings under a few “model” types (e.g., “oboe timbre” or “horn tim-
bre”). These terms were similarly listed under the lemmas oboe-like and horn-like.

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