Analogizing Timbre

Recently, I have been toying with new ways of describing timbre to non-musicians. Since we rely on metaphorical language so much of the time, I started to think about other disciplines and art forms that I could draw from. Much of our timbre vocabulary comes from the art world (e.g. bright, dark, harsh, muted, etc.) so I wanted to avoid that realm, but I maintained that the visual domain was an appropriate place to analogize timbre.

Over the pandemic, I became fascinated with design; specifically typeface design. Typefaces and fonts are all around us and have incredible communicative ability, yet most of the time we focus on the linguistic meaning of the collections of letters and implicitly make-meaning from the design of the font.