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Dark timbre: The aesthetics of tone colour in goth music
Abstract
Timbre is a key aspect of musical practice and aesthetics. Artists use instrumentation, vocal technique, and production technology to create precise tone colours; listeners are able to identify genres, artists and connotations through timbre. However, critical assessment of its ephemeral musical agency is scarce. This article develops a theory of timbre. Goth music, which privileges tone colour in production, performance, and aesthetic, is a case in point for the ungraspable agency of this musical parameter. Timbral analyses of two goth tracks, Veil of Light's ‘Cold skin’ and Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows's ‘Dreamland’, will assess tone colour's relation to identity and difference (Walser), signification and corporeality (Barthes, Ihde), and the surplus of meaning and embodiment (Dolar). The article will argue that timbral aesthetics are characterised by the paradox of present absence: it indicates corporeality and meaning but simultaneously exceeds both. Tangible but also disembodied, immersive but also meaningless, it is no wonder that goth exploits timbre's dark agency.
... The love of sound may speak to shared aesthetic values or shared musical contexts (Van Elferen, 2018). Although it aligned with our initial assumptions, the literature also indicates that timbral preference may not align with instrument choice (Kuhlman, 2005). ...
This study explores the complexities of caring for students in a music studio lesson. In this study, we engaged four experienced string teachers in in-depth semi-structured interviews to explore their understandings of caring for their students in studio music lessons. Caring and compassion are concepts that have received greater attention in music education literature in recent years. A critical turn in music education has accompanied this attention. We connect these two discourses through a theoretical framework of mature care as transformative practice. This framework is situated in Pettersen's concept of mature care. We applied the listening guide method of qualitative research and the gateway approach to analysis to create four found poems based on semi-structured interviews held with four experienced South African string teachers. This article illustrates the complex nature of the meanings of care, and advocates for instrumental music teacher preparation that ensures instrumental music education is infused with an ethic of care.
... With very few exceptions (e.g., Fales, 2005), literature on dance music has been curiously silent on the issue of timbre and as recently as 2014, Mark Butler wrote that "methodologies and theoretical frameworks for discussing [UEDM's] sonic dimensions simply [do] not exist" (p.15). Yet, outside the academy, notions of timbre permeate UEDM discourse, and have been shown -in rock music culture at least -to perform important genre-and self-identifying functions for listeners (Van Elferen, 2018). This suggests that timbre plays a significant role in UEDM fans' appreciation of their music of choice and warrants further investigation. ...
... With very few exceptions (e.g., Fales, 2005), literature on dance music has been curiously silent on the issue of timbre and as recently as 2014, Mark Butler wrote that "methodologies and theoretical frameworks for discussing [UEDM's] sonic dimensions simply [do] not exist" (p.15). Yet, outside the academy, notions of timbre permeate UEDM discourse, and have been shown -in rock music culture at least -to perform important genre-and self-identifying functions for listeners (Van Elferen, 2018). This suggests that timbre plays a significant role in UEDM fans' appreciation of their music of choice and warrants further investigation. ...
Familiarity with local places tends to focus on their gritty, mundane, bland features rather than approaching each journey with curiosity and attention to the multitude of sensations that are encountered. We suggest that reconsidering daily life through such a sensual lens has the potential to alter and attune us to the changes, shifts, and entanglements we have in and with the world. This chapter is a conversation that unfolds between the five authors, each in different locations in Australia and the UK. Interested in the way that attention to acts of ‘listening’ to the seemingly mundane and routine might be reconceived as a creative practice, we set a collective task of recording a short ‘audio walk’. We discuss the potential for the multi-sensory and affective atmospheric attunements to different rhythms, flows, and relations between human action and the nonhuman world and how such an appreciation of everyday life as interconnected.
German Idealism still dominates most approaches in theoretical biology. This has led to a conception of organisms as tightly regulated self-forming systems where the demands of the whole organism dominate how the parts are coordinated. This article troubles this approach by presenting aspects of biology that refuse to be synthesized into a specific whole. I call this approach “goth biology” as it recognizes the murkiness of systems of knowledge, the loosely composite nature of most living things, and the continual haunting of life by death. Methodologically, I use insights gleaned from the history of post-punk goth music to explore the role of aesthetics, timbres, and forms as elements of lives that bound disparate times and spaces without providing a unified synthesis. A form of biological experience, and a theory of how the body works, goth biology demands that one lose a conception of “self” in order to embrace the complexity of biological interactions. As the goth performance artist Anna-Varney Cantodea recently confessed in an interview: “I have long given up on any goals I might have had,” but this doesn’t keep me from being inspired by everything around me.
This chapter describes how the music club enactment of dark took shape alongside the activist one retracing the history of Milanese alternative music clubs, and in particular of the Hysterika disco, the main dark club in Milan in the 1980s. The specificities of the disco club enactment are addressed and compared to those of the activist enactment: these differences do not relate only to the stance towards political activism, which music club darks dismissed in favour of an identity politics that had to be expressed through a shocking style flaunted in urban public places. It related also to patterns of socialisation, relationship with public space, style and finally criteria of subcultural authentication. In this enactment, in fact, subcultural capital was gained showing high competences in the subcultural canon, regarding both cultural consumption (music, but also literature, theatre, cinema and the arts) and style, and subcultural identities were validated showing a coherence in style throughout all the situations of subculturalists’ daily lives. The two enactments had also their own sub-scene, even if these sub-scenes overlapped, allowing the circulation of members. The chapter ends with the closure of Hysterika in 1991, sketching the main lines of transformation of the enactment in the following decade.
This chapter addresses the audiovisual aestheticization of violence in contemporary pop music. Focusing on the Canadian artist The Weeknd, I aim to illuminate how the aestheticization of violence partakes in a broader negotiation of identity in a pop music context. Where much of the literature on the connections between music, sound, and violence focuses primarily on the role of music and sound in violent contexts, I tackle the matter of how violence is represented through audiovisual means. By resituating theories of intermediality within a critical musicological framework, I devote particular attention to the networks of meaning that are mobilized when The Weeknd’s music videos reference the formal and stylistic conventions of other media forms.
The introduction chapter addresses the myriad forms that musical experiences take, and presents the collection as aiming to capture something of the way in which popular music weaves into our society, culture, and lives. We introduce perspectives on how popular music is connected and entangled with other art forms, media, and phenomena, also raising the issue that the category of “popular music” is not necessarily one with stable or impermeable borders. In light of the diversity of current popular music scholarship, we argue for the benefits of introducing dialogue between disparate but mutually supportive approaches to analyzing and studying popular music.
Recorded music is as different to live music as film is to theatre. In this book, Simon Zagorski-Thomas employs current theories from psychology and sociology to examine how recorded music is made and how we listen to it. Setting out a framework for the study of recorded music and record production, he explains how recorded music is fundamentally different to live performance, how record production influences our interpretation of musical meaning and how the various participants in the process interact with technology to produce recorded music. He combines ideas from the ecological approach to perception, embodied cognition and the social construction of technological systems to provide a summary of theoretical approaches that are applied to the sound of the music and the creative activity of production. A wide range of examples from Zagorski-Thomas's professional experience reveal these ideas in action.
Goths represent one of the most arresting, distinctive and enduring subcultures of recent times. The dedication of those involved to a lifestyle which, from the outside, may appear dark and sinister, has spawned reactions ranging from admiration to alarm. Until now, no one has conducted a full-scale ethnographic study of this fascinating subcultural group. Based on extensive research by an ‘insider’, this is the first. Immersing us in the potent mix of identities, practices and values that make up the goth scene, the author takes us behind the faade of the goth mystique. From dress and musical tastes to social habits and the use of the internet, Hodkinson details the inner workings of this intriguing group. Defying postmodern theories that claim media and commerce break down substantive cultural groupings, Hodkinson shows how both have been used by goths to retain, and even strengthen, their group identity.Hodkinson provides a comprehensive reworking of subcultural theory, making a key contribution to the disciplines of sociology, cultural studies, youth studies, media studies, and popular music studies. Readable and accessible, this groundbreaking book presents a unique chance to engage with a contemporary, spectacular culture.
Listening and Voice is an updated and expanded edition of Don Ihde's groundbreaking 1976 classic in the study of sound. Ranging from the experience of sound through language, music, religion, and silence, clear examples and illustrations take the reader into the important and often overlooked role of the auditory in human life. Ihde's newly added preface, introduction, and chapters extend these sound studies to the technologies of sound, including musical instrumentation, hearing aids, and the new group of scientific technologies which make infra- and ultra-sound available to human experience.
Facts don’t exist. The sole truth lies in a tone of voice. Ned Rorem. Listening is one of the most cultured things one can do. Jonathan Sterne. Introduction. The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Carter G. Woodson outlines what he considers the fundamental role of the American educational system in shaping African Americans’ values and attitudes toward themselves. “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions,” Woodson writes. He continues, You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his “proper place” and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary. In short, social relations, power dynamics, and their contribution to the formation of self-image are all perpetuated through the state educational system. As a result, adults do not have to be taught their place in society: it is already instilled in them through their early encounters with the state as children. As this educational system forms our self-image and ideas about where we fit in society, so too does it shape our bodies — not only the ways in which we conceive of them, but also our literal bodies of flesh, ligaments, and tissue.
How does popular music produce its subject? How does it produce us as subjects? More specifically, how does it do this through voice--through "giving voice"? And how should we understand this subject--"the people"--that it voices into existence? Is it singular or plural? What is its history and what is its future? Voicing the Popular draws on approaches from musical interpretation, cultural history, social theory and psychoanalysis to explore key topics in the field, including race, gender, authenticity and repetition. Taking most of his examples from across the past hundred years of popular music development--but relating them to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "pre-history"--Richard Middleton constructs an argument that relates "the popular" to the unfolding of modernity itself. Voicing the Popular renews the case for ambitious theory in musical and cultural studies, and, against the grain of much contemporary thought, insists on the progressive potential of a politics of the Low.
This paper examines the early history of gothic rock, focusing on the British band Bauhaus and its 1979 single “Bela Lugosi's Dead” as the putative origins of gothic rock. Bauhaus was by no means the first band to be associated with a gothic sound/style; however, an investigation of the musico-cultural and historical context of the song, the critical discourse that developed around it, the aesthetic-philosophic influences that informed Bauhaus's style, and the sonic palette of “Bela Lugosi's Dead” locates the song as the launching point of gothic rock and the genre's sine qua non.1
After a hundred years of recording, the process of making records is still mysterious to most people who listen to them. Records hold a fundamental place in the dynamics of modern musical life, but what do they represent? Are they documents? Snapshots? Artworks? Fetishes? Commodities? Conveniences? This book explores recording consciousness and compositional process from the perspective of those who make records. It examines the crucial roles played by recording technologies in the construction of rock music and shows how songwriters, musicians, engineers, and producers contribute to the creat ... More
After a hundred years of recording, the process of making records is still mysterious to most people who listen to them. Records hold a fundamental place in the dynamics of modern musical life, but what do they represent? Are they documents? Snapshots? Artworks? Fetishes? Commodities? Conveniences? This book explores recording consciousness and compositional process from the perspective of those who make records. It examines the crucial roles played by recording technologies in the construction of rock music and shows how songwriters, musicians, engineers, and producers contribute to the creative project, and how they all leave their mark on the finished work. The book shapes an image of the compositional milieu by exploring its elements and discussing the issues and concerns faced by artists. Using their testimony to illuminate the nature of record making and of records themselves, it shows that the art of making rock records is a collaborative compositional process that includes many skills and sensibilities not traditionally associated with musical composition. The book connects all the topics–whether technical, conceptual, aesthetic, or historical–with specific artists and recordings, and illustrates them with citations from artists and with musical examples.
The recorded format is the medium through which popular music is diffused. Since the advent of multi-track recording, the studio has become a compositional tool in which musical ideas are formed into sounding matter. Direct access to the manipulation of sound layers and the possibility of mixing different sources and moving them in the stereo window become not only technical options but musical and compositional properties. In fact, the organization of the recording space reflects more and more the structural organization of the music itself; the sound of the record is a sort of sonicprint (sounding fingerprint) of the music of an artist in a particular period. This paper develops the idea of sonic space, a multi-dimensional representation of the recording space in which spatial, morphological and spectral spaces interact in order to form the structure on which the sounding matter of the piece is developed. Through the analysis of the properties of each space and their relationships, it is possible to point out normative behaviours, well defined associations between more musical aspects like motives, harmony, melodies and their organization in the sounding structure.
Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture; citation_author=Blesser, B.; citation_author=Salter, L.; citation_publication_date=2007
- Speak
Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song; citation_author=Moore, A.F.; citation_publication_date=2012
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A voice and nothing more
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