Music. Sound. CDEFGAB. Notes, rests, staffs, clefs. A conductor, producer, supervisor, artist, student. Loud, soft, crunchy, light, meaty, sweaty, fun, angry, loose, feel. Footsteps on a concrete sidewalk, the pumping beat of my heart muscle that drowns out the world. Tchaikovsky's 5th, John Mayer's Daughters, Ella's Someone to Watch Over Me. Honking horns, ghetto blasters on 22s, a bum on the corner noodling on his beat up guitar, my iPod riding down Wilshire on the 720 with a smelltrack of the vet sitting two seats over.
Whatever whoever wherever, life has a soundtrack. Music/sound is everywhere, and life exists with it/around it/based on it/because of it. Music/sound is everywhere, it never ceases, it is always and forever, breathing and beating and stomping and panting and whistling.
Timbre? Timber? I first ran across timbre in beloved novels, where the heroes always had that special deep quality in their voices that ran shivers of awareness and recognition up and down the heroines' spines. I then encountered the word in my Acoustics class, this almost secretive and unexplainable quality that distinguishes one instrument and one voice to another.
For some unexplicable reason, trees and wood seem to be a running theme within my life. I feel an immediate peace and bond with trees; their smell, their beauty, even when they've been cut down and carved and shaped into new forms, inspire me. Even the Chinese form of my Korean name 林礼根 has two elements of trees within: "Lin", my family name means 'wood', and the last syllable "Gen" means 'tree root'.
As I contemplated what to name this blog, timbre and timber seemed to charge my heart. Timbre, a mystical quality of sound, and timber, an elemental building block of life; if I'm going to write a blog about music and its influences on me and on the world, why not name it after the inexpressible structural pieces of music?
"Timbre timber": the characteristic structural qualities of music that outline and support the patterns of our lives (according to the Dictionary of Grace)
