"There were two different timbres of the voices that were there," Nixon says.
At no time in the history of music had the choice of available timbres been greater, and within the 16th century, as many instruments as possible were built in families.
Both deal with musical instruments and their capabilities of producing various timbres or colours.
Usual owl sounds include snaps of the bill, claps of the wings in flight, and a variety of vocalizations, with pitches, timbres, and rhythms unique to each species.
For electronic music, published scores have so far adopted either strict graph form (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Electronic Study II; see illustration) or pictorial form, using patterned drawings to represent different timbres (as in Henri Pousseur's Electre [see illustration] and Stockhausen's Kontakte).
The most important outcome for the composer was the development of a number of electronic musical instruments (such as the Hammond organ and the theremin) that provided new timbres and that laid the technical foundations for the future development of electronic music proper from about 1948 onward.
Glass's work reveals the variety of timbres available with the synthesizer, especially in duet passages with the violin soloist.
The range of timbres and processes is more limited because they operate by subtractive synthesis and impose transients that affect all partials (component vibrations) of a complex wave identically.
Mamiya Michio combined traditional timbres with 12-tone compositional technique in a koto quartet.
Compositions for such ensembles often excelled in economy of means and explored individual instrumental timbres.
Moreover, Williams soon expanded his mutes' ranges of timbres and expression and also became a master of open-horn playing.
