THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

generate spectrographs using the SpectraPLUS FFT Spectral Analysis System (Campbell,
CA: Sound Technology, 1998), and will use a maximum dB rating of 75 unless otherwise
stated.
While the concepts of pitch and loudness are described by the simple acoustic
properties of a sound wave’s frequency and amplitude, timbre is more complicated.
Although timbre is commonly referred to as a single characteristic of sound, and often
casually described as tone-color, since Helmholtz’s acoustic investigations in the mid-
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nineteenth century timbre has been dissected into its constituent elements, often relating
to the relative strength of its partials, for vowel like qualities, or the aperiodic properties
of its wave form, for noises. As these constituents have become better understood,
composers have taken greater control over these in structuring contemporary music, and
nowhere is this more true than in electroacoustic music, where the available technology
makes this sort of control precisely reliable. J.K. Randall states the challenge this presents
for music theory, using vibrato as a characteristic often grouped into the complex network
of timbre:
In electronic music, where spectra, envelopes, vibratos, and tremolos may be
structured over a whole composition with the degree of subtlety and efficacy to
which we have become accustomed in the domain of pitch, we must learn to stop
hearing vibrato, for example, as a vaguely subliminal way of lushing-up a tone; that
is, we must learn to stop mixing together a set of potentially independent musical
dimensions into a monolithic dimension within which we can continue to get off
easy by discriminating among ‘mellow timbres,’ ‘nasal timbres,’ and other similar
bushel-basket catches. In the presence of music so structured, the perception of
26Hermann
von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music,
nd th
2 English Ed., rev. and conformed to the 4 German ed. of 1877 (New York: Dover Publications, 1954).
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