Welcome
Welcome to Timbre Productions, a collection of creative explorations in tonality and inner spatial perception, through sound and other media.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Portions of this site are undergoing drastic remodeling, so some pages are, ah, shall we say, essentially blank. Changes and updates are occurring frequently, so please return in the near future to explore further.
Sound Art
Sound Art may be defined in multiple ways. My work in sound art falls into three artistic genres:
- sound compositions that do not fit well into the conventional definitions of "music"
- gallery installations involving sound as a key component
- sculptural speaker designs which highlight the aesthetics of audio transducer technology
Timbre 
refers to the tonality or "color" of a sound, namely, that which differentiates two comparable sounds from one another. A more precise definition is problematic, since the notion of "a sound" is itself dependent upon complex and highly subjective pattern-recognition faculties, many of which operate outside the reach of mind.
"Timbre" comes from an Old French word for drum, which in turn derives from the Greek "tumpanon" for drum. From these roots we have timpani (an orchestral kettledrum), and timpanum (the first stage of the ear's microphone system, commonly known as the ear-drum). Perhaps of deeper significance is the component Greek root "typto," which means "beat or strike" (see wikipedia, although I take issue with the "wastebasket" notion, which signifies little more than a lack of vocabulary for describing timbres). The purpose of the ear-drum is, of course, to begin the process of detecting the "beat" of pressure-waves in the surrounding atmosphere (aka "sound"). It is of course aspects of the pattern of those beats which we perceive as timbre.
My work focuses on both the timbre and the spatiality of sound. These two properties of sound are subtle and are usually not considered by people listening to performances. In music, orchestration and intonation both involve deliberate control of timbre, but melody, harmony, and rhythm tend to draw the attention away from timbre itself. Generally speaking, timbre in music comes after the three main elements of music; outside the domain of music, timbre goes unnoticed by most people.
Spatiality is an effect of sound upon our sense of the volumetric world "outside." We readily understand the spatial qualities of sound in a shower stall, an empty auditorium, or a large outdoor environment. These spatial qualities come from the brain's amazingly refined ability to discern very subtle timing differences between sounds arriving at one or the other ear. But spatiality does much more than provide us with a sense of the kind of space we're currently occupying. The spatial components of what we hear make it possible for the attention to focus on sounds almost entirely on the basis of their position in space. In a crowded party, for example, we can isolate one conversation among many by paying attention to the location of the voices we are interested in.
As with timbre, our awareness of spatiality is easily overshadowed by other sonic properties, such as music and speech. Therefore, to study spatiality or to compose performances that use spatiality as dominant compositional elements, one must endeavor to eliminate most of the other, more dominant, components of sound. This exercise, as it turns out, reveals much about our perception of sound and our inner model of the world, and has informed all my work as an artist and musician for the last decade. As a result, most of the sonic works found on this site have been created with an almost complete absence of the familiar and powerful components of sound: speech, melody, harmony, rhythm, and referential sound (sound "images" of recognizable sources such as dogs barking, doors slamming, glass breaking, cars honking, etc.).
If you like to explore how your own mind works, and how it manages to convince us that we live in a solid three-dimensional world of tangible things, or if you would enjoy learning to hear all the sound that our elaborate neuropsychological aparatus so skillfully hides from us, this site may provide some interesting food for thought, or at least some leaping-off points.
Photography & Video
I'm also exploring visual accompaniment to my sound works. Generally, when images (moving or static) are combined with sound, the sound is quickly relegated to a secondary role as "accompaniment" to the visuals. Even in film, including many with outstanding soundtracks by brilliant composers, the audience experience is so dominated by the visual narrative that deep and substantive music is rarely appreciated in its own right and often barely noticed, even though its role in the mood and interpretation of the film may be profound and indispensible. In contrast, my own sound compositions are much less familiar and often often contain few, if any, elements of traditional Western music, so in most visual contexts they readily assume a subordinate or even subliminal relationship to the visuals. In this rather extreme case, of course, it's hardly surprising that "musique concrète" derived from actual ambience recordings should be taken for background. "Ambience" is what, in a conventional context, we tend to think of as "silence."
Consequently, I have been on a quest for a visual context that does not dominate an abstract sound piece, one which can supplement a sonic composition in much the same way that "sound tracks" tend to be used for accompaniment to film and video. The Photography and Video sections of this site reflect some of my work in that direction. (Because photography has been an abiding interest of mine since childhood, the Photography section also contains a few albums of traditional representational shots that I hope visitors may enjoy.)
Obligatory Disclaimer
This site is perpetually under construction. Please accept our apologies for bad links, missing pages, typos, glitches, errors, mifteaks, confusion, chaos, dark forces, uncomfortable aromas, furch, dander, swarf, chad, or other objectionable material. Except as noted, everything on this site is the work of Allen Cobb, and is protected by the copyright notice below. You can contact the artist via electronic mail using the address "a" at "acobb" dot com.
Click here to go directly to the sound gallery pages.