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Everything we can't describe in music
The terroir of sound, timbre’s role has always been underrated, or even ignored, because it's so intangible.
The absence of a strict coding system means that some characterizations are noteworthy for their inventive evocativeness: one of McAdams’s research subjects described a sound as being like someone slapping a steak on a corrugated tin roof. “So shaping your voice for projection ends up creating a timbral quality to that music.” Similarly, as rock stars began playing large venues such as hockey arenas, the subtleties of harmony, if there were any, became lost. Some singers, especially in the early periods of commercial popular music, were encouraged to either accentuate their timbre—including accent, diction, ornamentation, and register—or to abandon what occurred naturally for them, in the interest of appealing to a wider or different audience.
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