Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge explores how timbre shapes musical affect and meaning. Integrating perspectives from musicology with the cognitive sciences, author Zachary Wallmark advances a novel model of timbre interpretation that takes into account the bodily, sensorimotor dynamics of sound production and perception. The contribution of timbre to musical experience is clearest in drastic situations where meaning is itself contested; that is, in polarizing contexts of reception where evaluation of "musical" timbre by some listeners collides headlong against a competing claim-that it is just "noise." Taking this ubiquitous moment as a starting point, the book explores affect, reception, and timbre semantics through diverse cultural-historical case studies that frustrate the acoustic and perceptual boundary between musical sound and noise. Nothing but Noise includes chapters on the racial and gender politics in the reception of free jazz saxophone "screaming" in the late 1960s; an analysis of contested timbral ideals in the performance practices of the Japanese shakuhachi flute; and an historical examination of the overlooked role of "brutal" timbres in the moral panic over heavy metal in the eighties and nineties. The book closes with a discussion of the slippery social fault lines separating perceptions of musical sound from noise and the ethical stakes of encountering another's "aural face."

About the Author
Zachary Wallmark teaches musicology and music cognition at the University of Oregon. His interdisciplinary research on timbre and popular music has been supported by the NEH and the GRAMMY Museum Foundation. He is coeditor (with Robert Fink and Melinda Latour) of The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford, 2018).

Reviews
Every musicologist should read this book, and it is required reading for those dealing with the cognition of music. Essential. * CHOICE *
In this book Zachary Wallmark confronts head on an aspect of musical practice that is at once elusive and essential: the enduring mystery of timbre. In Wallmark's hands, however, this mystery does not so much endure as become an entry point for exploring the bases of musical expression. Through a splendid blend of empirical research and humanistic inquiry, set out in lucid and approachable prose, he explains how timbre matters as well as why it matters. This is a foundational study that should be read by anyone who has wondered about why music matters, and by everyone who cares about how music shapes our social interactions. * Lawrence Zbikowski, Addie Clark Harding Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago *
With this book, Zachary Wallmark has made an ambitious contribution to the famously elusive study of musical timbre...Wallmark succeeds admirably in avoiding the shortcomings of both the scientific desire to study sound in isolation from the messiness of human subjectivity and the humanistic reduction of musical experience to the arbitrary play of cultural difference. His book is perhaps best viewed as an attempt not so much to bridge the 'two cultures' as to harmonize their best qualities. * Thomas Patteson, Journal of the American Musicological Society *
[Zachary Wallmark's] recent book Nothing but Noise Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge represents a rich and ambitious project aimed at defining a systematic analytical framework for the study of timbre and its meanings...by bringing together the deceptively opposing viewpoints of the humanities and of what are commonly and loosely referred to as the "exact" sciences. Wallmark offers both a comprehensive view of the timbre processing chain and a reflection leading to ethical implications that suggest a renewed attention to the role endowed by the timbral parameter. * Matthieu Galliker, Revue musicale OICRM *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190495107
Author Zachary Wallmark
Format Hardback
Page Count 232
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 164mm * 237mm * 19mm