Well today we're going to talk about timbre which is a very kind of odd word.
It's spelled t-i-m-b-r-e and that must be French because we pronounce
it "tam-bur"
not tam-bruuuhhhhh!
Or something other...
Don't call it 'tim-bur' though cause then everybody will know you are not being smart at
the concert. So what is timbre anyway?
Timbre is a unique sound that everything makes. Imagine this!
Your phone rings, you pick it up, say hello,
person starts talking.
You know by the sound of their voice
that that's your mother.
She doesn't have to say 'hi, this is mom,' you know what your mother sounds like.
That's because your mom has her own unique
vocal timbre.
Everybody does!
That's how we can distinguish things when we can't see them.
So humans have their own unique timbres. So do all the instruments.
So when we're listening to music, that's what we really listen for, that's the sound
that we're going for.
So far we've talked about all the little bits and pieces that make up the music
but we have to have sound to make all that happen. So we're going to do a little bit
about that sound today.
So everything has a timbre.
The human voice is obviously the one everybody's got. You carry it with you
everywhere. It's your permanently portable
musical instrument.
So let's talk about the different types of voices and you'll be very happy to
know
I'm not going to sing for you because I can sing but it's not really
pretty and so... we'll give you some really nice example of YouTube
videos that you can go to after you listen to this,
listen to some good singers
demonstrate each of the different vocal types for you.
So let's start with women singers.
First we have soprano.
That's the voice everybody pretty much knows... when you think opera
that's what you think. You think high screechy soprano, although a good soprano
is not screechy and we hope you will learn that through the
course of this class.
Then we have sort of the medium high female voice which we call
mezzo soprano. That's m-e-z-z-o, it's Italian and it just means medium so it's
a medium soprano.
For a novice listener it's kind of hard to tell the difference unless they're
singing really, really high.
So if you can't tell the difference between a soprano and a mezzo,
no big deal.
Generally a mezzo has a bit more mellow kind of voice, like we talked about
instruments having
mellow sounds. Singers also have that.
And then the third female voice is an alto or contralto which is sort of
the formal name for that.
You don't hear very much of that in popular music or even in the opera.
It's a low female voice. It doesn't project quite as well as a high
sound does;
as you know like a trumpet, you can hear that for miles,
but say if you're playing something like trombone,
it's a lower sound, it's not going to carry as much so,
the female singers, we usually hear mezzos and sopranos but those are our three
vocal ranges.
So now we're going to go to the men's side of things. So we have the highest male voice
which is the tenor.
You don't hear many tenors in popular music.
You really have to be trained to sing well as a tenor.
When you hear a high male voice, or a relatively high voice in
popular music of any type,
that's generally going to be a baritone.
They might have
a few tenor notes, some high notes in them, but mostly they are sort of in the mid-range of
what you would sort of think of as a normal voice.
So tenors,
high, again you might think opera if you think about the three tenors,
everybody knows them, so there's your high tenor voice.
Baritones in the middle
and then the bottom we have the bass, and that's b-a-s-s like the fish, bass,
but it's 'b-ace' not 'b-ass' so again don't embarrass yourself by saying that was a
nice 'b-ass singer,'
which is the low, deep
voice.
And whereas we don't have many contralto
parts in opera or other vocal works, we have lots of bass parts.
Historical tradition of
knowing what the characters
function is, or what kind of person they are based on their vocal range when we talk
about opera and other kinds of dramatic works,
so if you've got a big booming bass guy
he's usually a bad guy
and just like the black hats in the movies tell you that that's
the bad cowboy,
deep bass voice tells you that could be the bad man.
Or the alternative is that he might be
a comic character.
So if you've got
a sort of bumbling servant
or maybe
the town barkeep or somebody like that who's
not supposed to be noble
and sort of upright,
they'll make that person a bass, so if you go to an opera or some other kind of vocal
thing you can say, 'uh-oh, well that character is probably not our hero because
the voice range is lower.' So the hero is usually a tenor.
Servants who are not bad guys or who have significant roles
usually have that middle range so like in Mozart's 'Marriage of Figero,' Figero is the
star, you know it's his name that's on the opera.
But he is a servant.
So he's not a tenor. He's a baritone because it just wasn't done that a
tenor would be a servant. So you can sort of identify characters based on
their vocal types
in all sorts of vocal music.
So again we've got soprano, mezzo-soprano,
contralto or alto, tenor,
baritone,
bass. We describe the human voice that way.
We also have boy's voices, because a boy's voice doesn't change to being
tenor, bass, baritone until he reaches puberty. So when we talk about boys
and their voices we will call them boy sopranos
or boy altos while they still have high voices. We don't call them just
plain sopranos we identify them as being boys so you know that
their voice is going to change.
So we're going to use those same terms
in talking about all kinds of instruments.
When we talk about
the way that instruments are organized together or what we call orchestrated,
we'll refer to them as being a soprano instrument or a bass instrument.
Obviously the tuba is a bass instrument. It's very big, very deep.
Trumpet is a soprano instrument.
The flute is a soprano instrument.
Some instruments even come in multiple sizes with different names like the clarinet.
There's the soprano clarinet which is the one that most people know.
There's a little tiny one below that's even smaller than that that's also called
a soprano but it's like a
different key.
Then there's an alto clarinet. There's a bass clarinet; not a baritone. Saxophones;
there's soprano, alto, tenor,
baritone,
and bass. So we use those same terms that we use for vocal ranges
to talk about
all different kinds
of instruments and the way that we structure the notes within the music.
So it's really important to understand the relationship; what's high, what's low,
what's male, what's female,
and then you'll be all set
to talk about vocal parts.