Many music scholars suggest that timbre’s elusive and affective nature is mirrored in the vague adjectives and metaphors people use to describe it. I suggest an alternative approach to understanding the relationship between what timbre is (timbral ontology) and the ways people talk about it, based on my ethnographic research with violin-family luthiers on the U.S. East Coast. For violinmakers and restorers, talking about sound with musician customers plays a key role in their ability to tinker with instrumental timbre. I examine how luthiers’ timbral labor unfolds in audio recordings of sound adjustment sessions that I observed and participated in as a violinist. A sound adjustment session is an opportunity for a luthier to work with a musician to alter their violin, viola, or cello to improve its sound. I contextualize my analyses of these sessions by drawing on interviews I conducted with East Coast luthiers, and on studies of speech about sound in recording studios (Porcello 2004; Meintjes 2004). I argue that violinmakers and restorers do not locate instrumental timbre through individual words and phrases. Instead, they pinpoint timbre through extended interactions with customers that include multiple linguistic strategies as well as non-verbal activities such as tinkering with violins and listening to musicians play them. I demonstrate that studying how people talk about timbre in ways that are adequate to their professional needs can help timbre scholars move beyond the impasse of vagueness, to understand timbre as a sonic parameter that is concrete and socially mediated.

Typically made from a ram’s horn, the shofar remains the only surviving musical instrument used in Jewish religious practice since biblical times (Montagu 2015). On Rosh Hashana, Jews worldwide follow the commandment “to hear the voice of the shofar” during the shofar service. Synagogue attendees listen to patterns of three distinct shofar calls, defined solely by proportional duration and analogy to human vocalizations. Despite tremendous variation of melodic interpretation and articulation among Jews across diasporic traditions, the Mishnah dictates that sounds produced by a kosher shofar and heard with proper intent are considered correct (Rosh Hashana 27b). Notably, the shofar’s significance transcends these calls; scholars (e.g., Saadia Gaon; Maimonides) focus on its symbolic resonance rather than the meaning of specific calls. Thus, I argue the commandment is fulfilled through critical listening to timbre; hearing beyond the sonic realm into historical, spiritual, and personal meaning gleaned from the instrument’s timbre. To better understand what Jews, across the spectrum of Judaism, hear when they hear the shofar, this study engages with over two millennia of Jewish discourse ranging from the Old Testament and Talmud to the present (Gereboff 2017). Additionally, I analyze interviews with contemporary rabbis and shofar blowers, representing diverse diasporic practices, to supplement the written tradition, offering new insights into this ancient practice. Drawing from the disciplines of timbre semantics (Saitis and Weinzierl 2019), sound studies (Shafer 2003), and psychoanalysis (Lacan 2004), I recontextualize this religious practice with a focus on the shofar’s timbre within Jewish religious contexts.

The naubat ensemble, characterized by the distinctive combination of double reeds and drums, resounds from every corner of Asia and from every century of the second millennium. Played in the context of weddings, war, and worship at courts and shrines from Java to Bulgaria, this particular conjunction of timbres has acquired complex acoustemological resonances throughout its long history. In an interdisciplinary study that spans multiple cultures, I explore the nearly global diffusion of the naubat phenomenon, paying attention to timbre, form, function, organology, and musical-historical narratives. I argue that while the naubat ensemble formation spread originally from court to court via the battlefield, it also traveled through trans-Asian Sufi networks, and percolated into various ritual and ceremonial contexts where it may still be found today. The naubat sound and instrumentarium crossed cultural and religious borders as well, entering Western European art music in the Baroque era, for example, through colonial and diplomatic encounters. Building on the work of Erika Supria Honisch, Max Peter Baumann, Walter Feldman, Eric Rice, and Andrea Shaheen, I develop a theoretical approach I call timbral archaeology in which I question nationalist origin myths while listening for earwitness accounts and modern echoes of the naubat’s sonic semiosis.