2025

# Timbre — a Transcendent Paradox?

Eugenia Siegel Conte

Independent Scholar

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<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

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## Recommended Citation

Conte, Eugenia Siegel (2025) "Timbre — a Transcendent Paradox?," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol.

11: No. 1, Article 8.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1301

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar — A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Music & Religion by an authorized editor of EliScholar — A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact elischolar@yale.edu.
# Timbre — a Transcendent Paradox?

## Cover Page Footnote

With thanks to Max Jack, Kelsey Klotz, and Stefanie Tcharos for their thoughtful suggestions and support, and to Michael Conte for his osteopathic counsel and general fortitude. Dedicated to the Master Singers of Virginia.
# Timbre – a Transcendent Paradox?

Eugenia Siegel Conte

Just before 3 p.m., Christmas Eve 2019, King's College, Cambridge, U.K.:

The lines of choristers entered in pairs, each one wearing a red robe and white surplice, walking uniformly, careful to match their speed. The boys walked in first, from a door I had not noticed in the side wall, in front of the rood screen donated by Henry VIII to celebrate his marriage to Anne Boleyn. They were followed by the young men, almost double the height of the boy singers. I faced forward, not even trying to watch them as they congregated in their lines within the antechapel. The whole room drew an expectant breath – as did, I would expect, one particular young chorister who had just been told he would be singing the world-famous beginning solo of the “Nine Lessons and Carols” service, the first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City.”

As the boy soprano began to sing, his idiosyncratic, warm timbre soaring into the vertiginous columns, arched windows, and vaulted stone ceiling (built in the “Perpendicular English Gothic” style common in the sixteenth century), the entire room held that breath. Everyone knew this solo was a sonically dangerous point in the service. The BBC was recording the service for its 2019 radio broadcast, as it had done every year since 1928. We had been instructed in our service bulletin to avoid coughing, sneezing, movement–anything that could introduce extraneous noise in the recording. And this moment, this unaccompanied boy soprano’s opening salvo, is perhaps the most famous point of the service. Adding to the tension, the boy had been told only moments before that he would sing the solo–and that customary practice is common knowledge within the choral community present.

Seated next to me, my partner stifled a cough, resulting in a kind of asthmatic wheeze. We had waited in line with hundreds of people since 4:30 that same morning to hear this in person, in this chapel, with so many others who cared as much as I do about choral practice, history, and literature and wanted to experience this in their own bodies, with their own ears, eyes, in person and with other listeners, joined but still separated by each of our own connotations, memories, embodied knowledge, and tacet voices, carefully silenced in that generous and reverberant acoustic, waiting for boy and stone to sound that familiar arpeggiated tune:

> Once in Royal David's City / stood a lowly cattle shed.
> Where a mother laid her baby / in a cradle for his bed.
> Mary was that mother mild / Jesus Christ her little child.

This set of observations was written in hindsight, about six months after attending the service, as I had not yet determined that this experience should be a part of my research focus. When I realized how vivid and useful it was, I reached back into my memory to try to find the impressions that had crystallized around the experience of a choral service well known to many choral practitioners and aficionados around the world. Though it was not written in medias res, nor even close after, this short snippet of fieldnotes has become emblematic of my experience–as written memorializations often are–and I keep returning to it for different reasons, drawn back in the midst of different theoretical lines of thought, even several years after the event itself. In other scholarship, this fieldnote serves as an introduction to the
entrenched history of choralism in the United Kingdom and Europe, and how vocalism is
imbricated in physical space, cultural place, and affective experience and memory.

However, in this case, one word—timbre—has re-attracted my attention, illuminating
different avenues of thought that further complicate the facets of this embodied experience
and my memorialization of how it felt to experience and participate. My perception and
subsequent memory of the “Lessons and Carols” as an experience of transcendence certainly
connects to the cultural aspects of choralism imbricated in religious rite; but the interwoven
aspects of embodiment as related to sound seems as important to my narrative memories
as religious and cultural shibboleths. Suggesting that timbre is a shortcut between physical
experience and metaphysical reckonings, in this article I investigate how sound, body, and
space interact and undergird lived experiences of transcendence.

Revisiting and reinterpreting fragments of the above fieldnote throughout this article, I offer examples that show how timbral acoustics, alongside our bodies’ engagements with them, guide our emergent experiences and subsequent memorializations of them. Opening by overlapping ideas from the fields of affect theory and sound studies, I develop an understanding of timbral mechanisms and erotics that builds on ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales’s fundamental scholarship about timbre.¹ Relating timbre to work in religious studies, I propose that transcendent experience can be inherently tied to physical sensations of and adjustments to timbre due to the surreptitious nature of human reckonings with timbral phenomena. Using choralism as a starting point due to the delicate and honed nature of choral interaction with timbral production, I engage with osteopathic anatomical research to explain how the human body develops to subconsciously sense timbre and adjust to it within the resonant spaces of the sounding body.

The examples featured in this article are all choral, because choralism offers language
and practical negotiations that showcase both the importance of timbre in religious and
parareligious settings. Also, vocal curations of sound in choral praxis—as they are shown
and discussed in rehearsal and performance—illustrate how perceptive the human body can
be in the smallest nuances of sound. As singers shape their own voices for specific spaces and
for other concurrent singers within a timbral palette, they are often obliged to discuss how
best to curate their sound for affective reach and sonic effect, using verbal and body language
derived from expediency. Paying attention to these negotiations offers us a view both to the
diagnostic embodiments of choral vocalism *and* to how timbre, as sensed by human bodies
and ears through what musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim terms “intermaterial vibration,” can
become important to individual and cultural experience of divinity, made potent through
subconscious surreptition.²

However, in this article, I step back from choral praxis to examine the broader contexts
of human engagement in physical-affective intersections of faith and meditation that often
are key to praxes of worship. I show how timbre is imbricated and can gain meaning in these
experiences. Building upon scholarship that has examined architecture as a key component
in sonic experience in religious spaces, I suggest that embodied listening and adjustment in
acoustic space is made an essential variable in many experiences of religion—and that human
sensitivity to sound quality and emplacement of self is also a ubiquitous, if surreptitious, part
of everyday life. Timbre, “a slippery concept and a slippery percept,” as Fales writes, is the
quality of sound that is both the most connected with attributes of acoustic space *and* the
most subjectively understood via physical position and individual cognition.³ It is at once an
objective connection to a shared physical world and a cleavage point of subjectivity through
the lens of accrued knowledge and memorialized sensation. Combining aspects of physical,
cognitive, and emotional experience inherent in affect, timbre offers a boggy traverse that,
in the moment, can complicate self and other, space and time, and objective and subjective
aspects of experience.

The fieldnotes in this article were written well after the experiences they describe,
but they were not written with this set of investigations or arguments in mind. Revisiting
these memorialized narratives, drawn from other aspects of my fieldwork, allows me to
illustrate how physical experience of sound—and especially timbre—contributes to how
memory stitches together embodied immediacy with cultural and metaphysical storytelling
and meaning making. Scholarship connecting sonic sensation and cultural meaning within
memory shows how strongly memories are imbued with and based in immanent embodied
experience; and how embodied experiences can, in turn, cement these memorialized
narratives through remembered physicality and space.⁴ By using these fieldnotes-after-
the-fact, I hope to show that the paradox of timbre provides embodied experience with
inscrutable power; and that power may be ascribed to transcendent connections with divine,
conceptual, or metaphysical sources.

Embodied Timbres, Transcendent Affects

My scholarship has been motivated and underpinned by a desire to better understand why choral experiences—as a singer and a listener/experiencer—can be powerful, and what these experiences might show us about latent power in resonant spaces. As early as ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s introduction of the term *acoustemology* in the 1990s, interrelationships between sound, body, and physio-cultural ethos have guided investigations in sound studies and cultural theory.⁵ However, it was not until later that affect theory was overlaid with sound studies and ethnomusicological scholarship.⁶ Ethnomusicologist Lila Ellen Gray collates numerous scholars’ endeavors to overlap affect theory with sound studies, and identifies important claims about how affect must be understood in relation to sound: affect is always relational, always culturally situated, always outside of moral frameworks, and always resistant to linguistic translation or description.⁷ While I wholeheartedly agree that affect should be considered outside of morality/ethics, my field of study often urges a different view of affect connected to faith. Because I focus on choral praxes, the sounds, sensations, and emotions described and discussed by performers and listeners alike are often linked to considerations of morality, meaning, and frequently interconnected with their own notions of transcendence.⁸

My fieldwork, predominantly comprised of rehearsal observations with professional and
semiprofessional choirs in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe, coalesced around
a delicately honed form of embodied self-reflexivity that allows choral singers to adjust their
bodies in acoustic space to curate both sensation and emotion—the co-constitutive physical
and emotional/memorialized aspects of affect—in performance. To describe cyclic self-
awareness and adjustment in soundscape, I have proposed the term diagnostic embodiment.⁹
This description of process was meant to offer an alternative view of what choral practice entails and how choral practitioners reckon with specifics of their own bodies, others' voices, and acoustic spaces. The diagnostic cycle—which never coalesces into the noun “diagnosis,” as it is always in a state of becoming—is the singer-listener's process of interpreting physical and emotional engagement and their corresponding embodied vocal adjustments as they sing. Though this is certainly related to self-reflexive embodied awareness, it is the repetitive sequence of interpretation and readjustment that nuances this term beyond self-recognition. Choral practitioners' interpretations in response to physical and emotional feedback, used to guide their ongoing embodied engagements, are a key part of their artistry. Interpretation of and vocal adjustment to this feedback are developed in choral praxis as a foundational, if underrecognized, underpinning to choralism. Timbre is a key element of these situational and ongoing adjustments. Altered in a variety of ways, using language that is metaphorical, technical, referential, and related to other musical elements, the tone quality of vocalized sound is incessantly shaped in space, and interconnected with intended emotional components of choral delivery. This timbral link between physical and emotional experiences of sound provides a bridge between the physical immediacy of sound and the way singers and listeners are used to experiencing it on a metaphysical plane.

It was as I was formulating ideas about diagnostic embodiment that I returned to do fieldwork in Cambridge to further investigate the choral traditions entrenched in the city for my dissertation. I shared the fieldnote at the top of this article when I asked for access to the King's College Chapel Choir rehearsals (as rehearsal observation ethnography makes up a key aspect of my fieldwork process). In meeting with a scholar-administrator of King's College Chapel, it was explained to me that this writing was “not scholarship,” for many reasons—it was embarrassingly subjective, a “fairy-tale” view of the service, and did not offer any kind of research that might matter within a scholastic setting. Though I was eventually granted access to a few rehearsals, this interaction served as an important reminder that considerations of sound studies and affect theory are often downplayed in theology even as they are centered in religious studies approaches. It is the physical-affective reckonings in my written memorialization that bring me back to this delayed fieldnote even now; I believe these reckonings hold traces of the power of emotion, meditation, and devotion linked to embodied experience that allowed me to crystallize a narrative around this transcendent experience. The “feeling” (physical sensation, emotion, and subsequent memorialization, and memorable-ness) of the experience seemed powerful in and of itself. What physical and sonic mechanisms cemented the experience in my mind? What might account for the power imbued in that memory that built far beyond cultural capital? How might my sensing body, always cycling through diagnostic embodiment of sound in space, help me better understand the underpinnings of transcendent experience?

In their introduction to the edited volume *Ritual, Performance, and the Senses*, sound studies scholar Michael Bull and social anthropologist Jon P. Mitchell show that combining performance studies, cognitive science, and investigations of human sensoria offers broader field of scope within religious studies. Sensory studies, they write, “can also help us to understand the particularities of the experiential—not only that it is felt, but more specifically how.”¹⁰ Later in the volume, performer, theater educator, and martial artist Phillip B. Zarrilli
differentiates between our “inner” and “outer” experiences of embodiment, highlighting the differences between our physical actions and sensations and the way that they are understood and narrativized in conscious thought. This binary “reflects the fundamental, intractable ‘problem’ of attempting to reconcile our inhabitation of the physical body, and our ‘inner’ experience of that embodied practice.” Zarrilli suggests that the “inner” facet is indicative of the mental processes during experience and the ways one understands this state of consciousness.¹¹

The surreptitious accrual and concentration of power through sound in various religious contexts and architectural milieus shows how the sonic, through human sensoria, may be integrated into cultural conceptions of the divine as a part of Zarrilli’s “inner” facet of imminent experience—which is not only about the “intellectual mind,” but instead is about our cognitive experience of embodiment and agency. This intervention can nullify the Cartesian mind-body split and common reification between “sacred” and “secular” quotidian experiences, as well as show that embodied experiences of space, time, and sound can be interwoven with considerations of emotion, ethics, and metaphysics.¹² Refocusing inquiry around timbral sensation and interpretation, I seek to show the mechanisms between physical sensors of the human body and the culturally guided methods of interpreting timbre. These mechanisms allow religious studies scholars *and* theologians an avenue to consider transcendence—a heightened state beyond ordinary experience—as a specific type of interengagement between individual bodily sensation and layers of cultural comprehension that grant power to the experience, both during and afterward.¹³

As one of the more recognizable qualities of sound, but the most difficult to describe, timbre allows us to consider physical/emotional (affective) experiences of sound as integral to sonic and affective atmosphere.¹⁴ Timbre, Cornelia Fales writes, is “paradoxical” precisely because it is one of the most exacting ways to ascertain and comprehend the source of a sound even as that comprehended sound is impossible to describe outside of analogy—and that timbre, when separated from other markers such as volume, pitch, or heaviness, is a quality that resides almost entirely in the experiencer, seldom thoroughly measurable, even in sound recordings and spectrograms.¹⁵ In resorting to analogy and metaphor, we, as those within and a part of the room’s sound, are forced to describe timbre only through a lacquer of allusions, cultural conglomeration, and shibboleths ever-receding from broader and more current contexts. Timbre is a rich site of culturally specific allusion and metaphor illuminating values and embodiments of religious contexts, rituals, and acoustic spaces. Timbre is also a reverse diagnostic for the embodied experiences of sound that we translate from sensation to connotation, from sonic force felt to sound personally and situationally catalogued and understood. Thinking about how sound affects our bodies as we experience it can teach us how to further appreciate the complexity of our body’s capacity within a cycle of sensation, emplacement, recognition, and the construction of memory and meaning.

Much language describing transcendental, meditative, and/or devotional experiences within shared space often is stylized by the praxes of religion, and also often is used to attempt to describe the interconnections between physical experience in shared spaces and mental/emotional experience guided by curated ritual within those spaces of rite.¹⁶ Considering how human bodies may physiologically experience timbre, and tracing how those experiences
are translated through religious lenses into meaning, offers scholars a way to honor the interpretations of faith-based practices and to reinforce the surreptitious everyday experiences of sound, space, self and other, and emotional processes within liminal interaction.

Endeavors to bridge chasms between acoustic aspects of timbre and culturally created atmospheres must, however, admit the subjectivity of the researcher, and aspects of *affect*. Affect, as a term, may be considered as multifaceted as timbre in that it refers both to the situational and relational conditions of physical sensation, as well as to the complex memorialized and conditioned cultural understandings within cognition and resulting emotion. As cultural studies scholars Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth describe affect, they note the sensational aspects that feed into subsequent contextualizations and interpretations of feeling.¹⁷ Gregg and Seigworth show how affective experience is a cyclic vacillation between embodiment and interpretive response, never capable of matching the experience of another but often overlapping in points of connection that cannot be adequately, or systematically, predicted. Indeed, they show how this cycle is not limited to human bodies. It may be considered—though never completely understood—in relation to any sentient being with corporeal form.¹⁸

Inquiring about the capacities and structures of the human body and discussing how sound interacts with bodies from an anatomical point of view reveal another facet of individual experience. Throughout this article, I will be discussing various ways that “the body” is acted upon by sound and the overtone series to flesh out connections between physical acoustics and human physiological sensoria. I am, for the sake of this discussion, focusing on relatively average physiological structures—but I do not mean to imply that there are no differences between human bodies, capacities, faculties, or functions, or that these differences have no bearing on how sound may act upon a specific individual’s body.¹⁹ However, physiology differs, and bodies are changed and influenced by a variety of external factors as well. Here, I endeavor to talk about average bodily structures and development of the human form—and how these structures assist in the sensoria of the body—in terms specific to structures and general capacities, rather than empirical definites. The purpose of identifying and showing these acoustic and physiological phenomena is to illuminate the ways that body and space are interconnected through mechanisms that can powerfully shape aspects of experience and color immanent awareness and subsequent memory.²⁰ Indeed, it is the surreptitious power transferred from embodied experience of space to sociocultural contextualization that leads to an engagement with (various conceptualizations of) transcendence and the divine.

## Sensing Timbre

*As the boy soprano began to sing, his idiosyncratic, warm timbre soaring...*

It is not surprising that timbre, a realm of sonic marker described by ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales as “having no domain-specific adjectives,” is imbricated within experiences (of the divine and of everyday life) in various culturally specific, even codified, circumlocutions. For example, the English word *reedy*, a timbral term related closely to the instruments it references, is direct—in that it relates to the instrument reeds that vibrate to create sound in wind instruments—but is circularly referential, a tautological syllogism. Reed instruments have a reedy timbre because they sound like instruments that have reeds. Circular definitions
and descriptions, often referring to visual rather than sonic markers, make a scholarly approach
to timbre tricky, as the language itself is so built on reference that it stymies investigation of
the underlying sensations that allow human bodies to hear, catalogue, and react to quality of
timbre without the cultural knowledge and relatability that afford language for the experience.

Acoustic spaces of worship—in a variety of contexts—may each be reckoned through embodied experience of timbre, as I will show further along in this discussion; and, in that reckoning, the self is both emplaced and transgressed in the experience of sound. Fales, describing the “paradox” of timbre, writes:

> One of the objectives of hearing, as of all the senses, is to furnish listeners with accurate information about the environment. We will see that the dimension of timbre is particularly implicated in achieving this objective: not only does timbre carry the most information about a source and its location, but of all parameters of music, it also carries the most information about the environment through which the sound has traveled.²¹ The paradox emerges with the observation that while timbre is a dimension of central importance to identifying sources, it is also the dimension that is most divergent from the sound in the physical world.²²

Fales’s definition of this paradox shows that timbre, more than other characteristics of
sound, acts upon the body and is acted upon by the body; it is reckoned by the experiencer
both as an individuated manifestation of self—a specific hearing in a specific point in space
understood by a specific being—and as a transgression of individual being or selfhood, a
physicalized imbrication that dissolves boundaries between object and subject, self and other,
and acoustic space and time. “The paradox exists,” Fales continues, “because however different
the perceived version of a source might be to the physical signal it represents, it is a version
that works in our world, it is a version that is consistent with versions of other listeners, it is a
version ‘real’ enough that it allows us to deal with the physical environment. The version is that
source to us, and as long as it continues to work, we need no other.”²³

The relational aspects of timbre—a self-emplacing yet transgressing subjective reckoning
of sonic originating object and the space in which it sounds—are far more complex and
overwhelmingly liminal than one might realize in the moment. Fales concludes her point
by noting, “that the paradox of timbre is rarely appreciated by ordinary listeners is a sign
that the system that processes sounds for perception is also careful to keep its transformative
operations outside of the awareness of the listener.”²⁴ In terms of diagnostic embodiment, the
recognition of and adjustment to timbre require honed physical and auditory senses, a cultural
understanding of whether the sound should be altered or adjusted for, and knowledge of one’s
own body to make adjustments that the timbral sensation seems to urge. And throughout the
process of diagnostic embodiment, timbre is like the ghost in the machine, a powerful sonic
motivator that is almost impossible to pinpoint and describe.

It is this surreptitious cloaking that allows timbre a magical quality beyond other, more
quantifiable and describable aspects of sonic awareness. Connecting the human-based cognitive
science of sonic processing with timbre, Fales writes that humans perceive elements of sound
very differently—“timbre is what a sound is,” as opposed to pitch and loudness, which are
“what a sound does.” Furthermore, she argues:
Given that timbre is critical to human contact with the environment and a sonic dimension we track with peculiar sensitivity, given that timbre is routinely cited as one of the four parameters of sound, the fact that it attracts so little attention becomes itself part of the mystery: timbre seems to do its considerable work with secretive discretion.²⁵

Choralism, a European-derived musical lineage developed for and within Christian religious ritual, requires minute attention and adjustment to timbre.²⁶ This tradition is only one way that acoustics and sonic embodiment are engaged in a variety of religions, but I refer to it throughout this article as an example of how honed skills around timbre can be and how those skills might lead to transcendent states within religious rite and beyond. This set of attentions, though they are developed in response to embodied acoustic sensations, is embedded in webs of cultural competencies that tie the physical experience to a “beyond.” Therefore, though this article relies on choralism to provide some examples, the effects of timbre could be investigated in other arenas of faith, meditation, and embodied awareness where different cultural competencies have accrued around timbral instigators.

In considering timbre as an important aspect of emotional connection and physical experience, I am coming to these questions as a choral practitioner—someone trained in the skills of feeling and adjusting for timbre and attuned to the language used in rehearsal to communicate about needed timbral changes. Particularly in choral settings, it is important to learn quickly both to hear/feel and to adjust to timbral particularities, as often they are linked to the vowels being sung and therefore to both the text being delivered and the sound quality of each word. The matching of vowels between singers can affect pitch and tuning. Some of the renegotiated adjustments of diagnostic embodiment in choral praxes rely on overt characteristics of acoustics and convention. For example, adjusting to how long sound may take to decay in an acoustic space—that is, how long the performance space “rings” or “sounds”— is one of many small but essential situational adjustments. Volume and speed are adjusted within the cycle, too, guided not only by a conductor but also by the sensations of sound heard and felt in performers’ bodies and interpreted relationally between singers in the ensemble. But one of the most prevalent adjustments I witnessed in rehearsals and experienced myself as a singer was curating and adjusting tone quality—also known as timbre—to produce specific effects.

Timbral shorthands are often used to correct issues with pitch matching. For example, the word “bright,” borrowing from visual terminology, has several meanings that lead to alterations in the voice. Generally, it is used to encourage a vocal production brought forward into the mask of the face — a more “nasal” sound using the sinuses and hard palate as a resonator, rather than one that sounds caught in the back of the pharynx (sometimes referred to as a “dark” sound). However, the term “bright” also encourages a different placement of vowels, causing a timbral change.²⁷ In the case of “bright” and “dark,” rather than being terms for timbre that are related to instrument classes, they are about timbral changes that encourage more (“bright”) or fewer (“dark”) overtone partials within an acoustic space. However, these terms are also used in ways that link timbre to overall curation of affect in performance.

In February 2024, the British-based professional sextet The King’s Singers released a video from rehearsal as they worked on English composer William Byrd’s Catholic motet “Laudibus in sanctis” (1591).²⁸ After recording, the singers provide some captions sharing
their thought processes as they approach the piece. In these short descriptions, there are
several examples of timbral shifts, using a variety of language that is primarily based around
what the change in timbre is supposed to do or signify. The video synchronizes with the
moments in the piece they are curating, so that viewers can listen for these audible effects.
Though there are comments that touch on many aspects of the piece—the version of spoken
Latin they choose to use and changes in volume dynamics to highlight contrasts between
sections or even phrases—much of the accompanying commentary, when unpacked, refers to
deliberate curations of timbre. The first caption, “At the opening, we try to sing with bright
vowels which set up the joyful atmosphere of the piece” (Fig. 1), indicates that their vowel
placement toward the front of their mouths and sinuses—a timbral shading which may be
referred to as bright, nasal, metallic, or even just “forward” by some musicians—connects to
affective experiences of joy. Later in the piece, the singers come back to a similar use of metallic
brightness, though this time they are imitating horns—“Here we’re finding a ‘brassy’ quality
in our singing to make an impact with the first full choral entry, ‘firmamenta’” (Fig. 2). Both
instances indicate a deliberate shift of timbre. In the commentary, they are focused on the
vocal techniques and vowel placement of those sounds and their intended effect in choosing

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Screenshot of The King's Singers video</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2: Screenshot of The King's Singers video</figcaption></figure>
these vocal approaches. However, the root of these practical negotiations is an engagement
with the overtone series and the acoustics of the practice hall.

At a few points in the piece, tuning and timbral matching between voices is noted as a key
element in The King's Singers' interpretation. "On 'saepe sonate manus,' Eddie and Pat are trying
to make sure their sound is perfectly matched for these imitative entries," the caption notes,
referring to countertenors Patrick Dunachie and Edward Button (Fig. 3). The imitative entries
are phrases repeated between these two voices, and the singers have decided to bring both their
tuning and timbral quality—through vocal techniques in shaping vocal resonators in the mouth,
throat, and sinuses—as close to each other as possible to highlight traded melodic material.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3: Screenshot of The King's Singers video</figcaption></figure>

The video also displays how lyrical diction can be enhanced through matched timbral
quality. At the beginning of a new section of the piece, the caption reads, "With the
introduction of this new homophonic texture, we bring the text production to the front of
the mouth, allowing the text delivery to be crisp and immediate." The "front of the mouth" is
a similar timbral coordination to the one mentioned at the beginning of the piece, a "bright"
tone that they are using here to make the text more audible and vibrant. "Immediate" refers
to the use of the forward placement and resulting bright timbre to deliver aspects of diction
to desired effect. And sometimes, rather than simply delivering language, vowel placement
is curated to heighten emotional ends, as well as to connect between singers. Focusing on
the word “auris” moving toward a cadence, the caption reads, “As we finish the phrase, we
try to colour in the wonderful diphthong on the first syllable of ‘auris.’ This helps both the
expression and ensemble. Could do better!” (Fig. 4). The notion of “tone color” is often
used to describe aspects of vocal timbre that, in this case, are being shaped to invigorate the
ending of a phrase and to encourage a strong, interconnected sound between the singers as
they approach the cadence.

In terms of tuning, timbral shaping and matching are of key importance in this strand of
choral tradition. At the end of the piece, a caption reads, “As we arrive at the final cadence, we’re
doing some ‘vertical listening’ to make sure we’re well in tune with the same notes in other
voice parts, for a ‘ringing’ final chord” (Fig. 5). As much as the singers are listening to be sure
that the pitch they are singing is placed within the overtone series of the final chord, relying on
embodied feedback and aural skill, they are also listening to each other “vertically,” noting the
vocal placement and “tone color” (or “timbre”) of other voices and seamlessly adjusting their
embouchures. This ensures a chord with more vibrant overtones in that, by matching timbral
quality, everyone is tuning within the reflective acoustic overtone series of the performance
space *and* activation of similar individual spectra of overtones by single voices.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4: Screenshot of The King's Singers video</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5: Screenshot of The King's Singers video</figcaption></figure>
The King’s Singers rehearse this piece in a small auditorium very far removed from the religious spaces that William Byrd would have expected the work to be performed in; and it is not only a visual aesthetic difference. Byrd’s era (he lived from circa 1540 until 1623) squarely placed his works in reverberant masonry churches, cathedrals, and court halls, and the work would likely have been sung in settings of religious worship, rather than in a concert for the general public audiences The King’s Singers attract around the world. The cultural and political context of the time would have been vastly different, as would understandings of theology.²⁹

In the examples above, these sounds are identifiable as vocal, but the changes in timbre are used to facilitate interpretive and emotional curation through physical acoustics. This is core to what choral singers do, which is likely why it is more directly discussed than timbre generally is in musical/sonic contexts (though in practical language based in a shared history of vocal technique and metaphorical description). The singers draw upon their knowledge of how their efforts may be emplaced in paradigms of this choral tradition and are operating under the assumption that they can curate experience, at least in part, by curating timbre in different ways for different purposes and to deliver different meanings. That means that they believe others experience timbre in similar ways, whether or not nonsingers are aware of these micro-engagements.

Operating upon this assumption—for assumption it is, though cognitive science indicates there may be ways of proving this—we can extrapolate that timbral awareness is far more widespread than is recognizable on linguistic, or even conscious, levels in moments of experience. This is another facet of the timbral paradox(es) Fales describes, and the power inherent in this aspect of sound suffused into all sonic experiences. In later work, she further addresses the disconnect between what humans may consciously comprehend (and be able to identify and describe in language) and what is still sensed, as she puts it, “implicitly”: “it has been known for some time that though on the conscious level of music listening pitch is more immediately and deliberately attended, auditory acuity on an implicit level is more attuned to variations in timbre than to comparable changes in pitch.”³⁰ Timbre, then, may be best engaged through our highly individual sensoria alone, rather than through a conscious clocking of it. Categorizations of timbre, as shown above, tend to be referential, metaphorical, or tautological, bound to our own cultural experiences and competencies.

Revisiting my fieldnote from King’s College Chapel, I am not sure what exactly I was trying to say by referring to the boy soloist’s timbre as “idiosyncratic.” I suppose I chose not to find language for the quality of his voice, or the way it sounded in the chapel, or how it might be heard through that day’s recording or even in another seat in the room. Rather, I transposed all those characteristics into one word as a refusal, an indicator of the overwhelming overlap of variables of that moment in a shared space with other people who were invested in this lived experience. I couldn’t pinpoint or track these overlaps in that moment, just as I cannot describe his tone quality to any specific degree now through a lens of memory. However, I could tell that my physical perceptions within that moment, my “inner experience,” were not translatable into description that would represent the affective meaning the experience held, and holds, for me.

I believe I used the word “idiosyncratic” because I was surprised by the singer’s timbre as well as by the way the timbre acted upon the room and upon every body in it. Though I had frequently heard the “Nine Lessons and Carols” service broadcast, this was a different singer,
a different time and place, and a different set of affective embodiments. *In that moment, I was acted upon and adjusted in ways I did not consciously fully understand.* My experience was at first guided by my past assumptions, and then interrupted by the chorister's rising and refracted sound, returned to him and me via space-specific reverberance. I sensed his timbral mark in the acoustic implicitly but was not able to contextualize it in the same way that I might have done before; I changed as I heard it. And timbre, as a key element of sound implicit in our sensoria but not explicit through our cultural competencies beyond references, connects my body back to this moment.

## Devotional Acoustics

... into the vertiginous columns, arched windows, and vaulted stone ceiling (built in the “Perpendicular English Gothic” style common in the sixteenth century) ...

As I sat in King's College Chapel in 2019, the architecture of the building was on my mind and acting upon my body. Emplaced in that reverberant acoustic, surrounded by vestiges of history that I couldn't fully comprehend, I felt the sonic potentiality of that space and my physical/ affective reaction to it. When I returned to the chapel to observe rehearsals in 2021, I was reminded of how complex the sonic aspects of the building are. The Chapel Choir practice there daily and therefore become intimate with that space. Choristers train their bodies to use their voices in the chapel in ways that feel reliable and reproduceable the next time they are called upon to sing there, and learn how their voices interact with other voices by feeling, as well as hearing, these combinations. The choir typically rehearse, and sometimes record, in an empty chapel, meaning the acoustics are highly resonant, without bodies to soak up the sound. Additionally, when an audience is present, all that absorbent flesh is attached to people – listeners who are there for a specific experience within the acoustic. This is made all the more complex by the fact that the rood screen separates the space into two main areas: in front, the “choir,” where the pews are turned inward toward the center aisle, populated in part by the choir itself along with the clergy and members of the college and public worshippers; behind, the “antechapel,” an area sometimes left without chairs entirely but used during the “Nine Lessons and Carols” and other popular services for additional seating. During the service, I was seated in the antechapel; but during rehearsals, I sat in an unpopulated section of the choir stalls, which made clear how difficult it is to shape sound for the whole space and for recording purposes rather than for localized perceptions of sound. Conductor Daniel Hyde had to think carefully about the various functions of the “Nine Lessons and Carols” service, and curate the singers’ timbre and musical style to serve the space and the people who would share it.

In the rehearsals I observed, Hyde talked through some of these considerations, seemingly both for the singers' benefit and for the benefit of the BBC recording technicians who were setting up to broadcast and record the Christmas Eve service. Particularly when rehearsing the hymns that would be sung with the congregation (rather than the pieces that would be sung by the choir alone), Hyde discussed how the acoustic would be much “drier” (less reverberant) than they were used to because of the full audience, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, when they had had no congregation at all. Singing through the Advent hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem” during rehearsal, Hyde asked for clearer diction and slower, longer
phrasing to accommodate the congregational singing, which generally runs well behind the established speed of the hymn set by the organ. “You’ll really feel it tomorrow,” he said, referring to the Christmas Eve service, “that there isn’t that cushion and there’s nothing, no resonance, to keep you going. So watch me, allow me to shape it as I listen.” Hyde talked frequently throughout these rehearsals about acoustic decay, a change in dynamic or intensity in the legato vocal line, and the singers’ shaping at the ends of phrases that eased these reverberations into a falling-off of sonic presence in the room. Later in the rehearsal, he reiterated how important his direction is in shaping phrases specifically for the acoustic—“At the end of a phrase, allow me to show you where the decay is.” Hyde indicated to the singers that, as much as the BBC was responsible for “cook[ing] it in the box so you can be heard” on the recording, he himself was responsible for noting acoustic nuances and discrepancies of sound and shaping them according to what his ear, embodied experience, communication with the organist, and desired interpretation of the musical material dictated.

Hyde’s delicately honed engagements with the King’s College choristers and organist and the BBC broadcasting crew were consistently tied to the acoustic considerations of the chapel space. To these ends, he used various strands of linguistic reference to guide and query sonic needs. While many of the articles in this special issue of the *Yale Journal of Music and Religion* focus on cultural, even micro-cultural, language of metaphor and allusion around timbre, it seems important to make connections between timbre and the acoustics that help to produce them. It might seem that consideration of spatial and relational acoustics, and how they act upon the body, would be removed from the verbalized thoughts of religious practitioners (as opposed to musicians), who therefore should dismiss this type of discussion as unnecessary and overly theoretical sophistry. However, taking into account how bodies and sound are implicated in acoustic spaces is fundamental to comprehending the power of timbre in faith, as well as in physical and metaphysical relational emplacement.

Over the last half-century, scholars have considered the resonant acoustics in houses of worship in many contexts, with considerable spotlight on Abrahamic religious praxis, circling closer to how sonic resonance might encourage attitudes of devotion. Sonic shaping in indoor and outdoor soundscapes has been discussed over the last ten years in Islamic contexts,³¹ and, far earlier, considered in predominantly Christian France relating to the ubiquity and emotional power of church bells.³² The original sonic milieus of Gothic Christian soundscapes have been reconsidered through the (re)constructions of and acoustic negotiations within cathedrals in modern urban life.³³ More recent scholarly interventions have refocused on architectural acoustics and soundscapes in strands of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as on variations on acoustic praxes and values in Abrahamic religions outside of the Middle East, Europe, and North America.³⁴ Recent investigations show that sonic considerations in the design of worship spaces are frequently tethered to the value systems of the religion to be practiced within.³⁵ This scholarship, overall, emphasizes how important soundscape is within worship traditions and communities, and bridges a gap between areas of study in religious iconography/imagery, systems of aesthetic and affective value, and soundscape.

Sociologist and urban planner Jean-Paul Thibauld has collated theory from several areas of study to show how affect, through attunement, may overlap with how we consider acoustics, embodiments, and sound in worship praxes. Drawing upon literature scholar
Hans Gumbrecht's meditations on atmosphere and mood, Thibauld defines "atmosphere" as describing the "experimental and sonorous dimensions" of space and the cultural connectivity that creates place. Through atmosphere, Thibauld writes,

[w]e can explore how these fundamental dimensions of existence are concretely embodied and entangled with the world of the senses. Hence the purpose is not to develop a theological approach but rather to open up to phenomenology. On the other hand, paying attention to places of worship in terms of attunement leads us to question the sound world itself. Sound is then charged with its pathic and affective, rhythmic and corporeal, communal and impersonal features.³⁶

Thibauld overlaps the acoustic world of sound (a physically shared set of phenomena) with sensational embodiment, noting the ways that we characterize, collate, and generally make meaning of sonic sensation in religious and devotional praxes. Suggesting a reverse engineering of sonic experiences in religious milieus—that is, paying attention to how culturally specific acoustic traditions and architectural designs serve a particular religious ethos and mindset—he shows how we might extrapolate how sacrality is defined and achieved through sound *and* how sound is interconnected with and instigates feeling, emotion, faith, ethics, and memorialized sensation, all housed under the term “affect” and intertwined in contextualized relational experience. Thibauld indicates that this reversal allows scholarship to sidestep religion-specific assumptions of theology, while still earnestly engaging with personal descriptions of ritual and feeling within faith-based practices. “If places of worship rely on the creation of particular ambiances,” he notes, “sound makes it possible to characterize how such places are charged with atmospheric forces and specific affective tones. In other words, resorting to the universe of sounds helps us to understand how a place is likely to become impregnated with spirituality.”³⁷

Until recently, interdisciplinary overlap discussing sound and architecture, affect, and experience of worship has not been attempted because the inherent interdisciplinarity of the approach must necessarily rely on many fields of scholarship, including religious studies, theology, and sound studies, but also integrating acoustics, human anatomical considerations, critical theory, and affect theory. But the other reason may be that understandings of, and language around, timbre is imprecise, culturally referential, and, to use Fales’s term, paradoxical.

## Diagnostic Embodiment

*... the entire room held its breath.*

Some attention to how the human body develops, and how its forms guide sonic experiences in a way that feeds into affect, offers new ways of more specifically conceptualizing affect.³⁸ The connective tissue covering body as a complex sensor is a calibrated tool engaged with timbre.³⁹ In 2018, fascia—a most of the body’s organs, muscle, and bone—was reclassified as one of the body’s sensory organs rather than a structural membrane.⁴⁰ Medical anatomist, educator, and researcher Frank H. Willard has focused at least part of his research on fascia and the role it plays in highlighting the body’s structures and sensory abilities.⁴¹ He posits
that the way in which fascia forms and functions in the body below the mandible (jawbone) is markedly different from how it forms and functions in the head.⁴²

Willard describes the fascia in the body below the mandible – which he termed the “trunk,” surrounding the viscera, internal organs, spinal column, and muscle – as relatively fixed. It also closely protects the nervous system that runs through all parts of the lower body and can influence the sensation of embodied experience – what Nina Sun Eidsheim calls “visceral,” but could more appropriately be referred to in medical terms as infraclavicular (referring to any bodily structure or process lower than the clavicle bone). This lower portion of the body, making up much of our physical being, is involved with sensing internal and external stimuli only, and relaying those sensations back to the brain.

However, the fascia and bone systems of the head are far more changeable throughout youth. They have to be malleable, since the head is not fully formed at birth and continues to grow through the first six years of life.⁴³ Notably, this is the period during which many, if not most, humans learn spoken language and how to comprehend the soundscapes and sonic cues of the spaces they inhabit. The head itself is developing over this period, and the cultural application of human-produced sound adapts to and influences the ways in which the ear canals, jaw, and sinuses grow and are used to create and perceive sound. Therefore, the fascial, bone, and muscular layers in the head can adjust to cultural influences as intracranial spaces and mechanisms develop over time. As we develop cultural understandings of voicing, language, and sound, as well as perception of sonic markers like pitch, loudness, acoustic spatial markers, and timbre, we are also developing and honing the structures that help to perceive and produce them.

These structural systems of development that guide sensation show that the use of the head as a sonic sensor, resonator, articulator, and modifier is functionally different and separated from the physical processes that allow us to sense sound infraclavicularly. The auditory canal is indeed above the mandible; so, hearing is also guided by these same malleable fascial layers integrated into the head. However, human anatomy has not developed to encourage the skill of changing the ear's embouchure at will. As osteopathic physician, researcher, and medical educator Jane E. Carrero explains, the muscles and bones of the jaw, tongue, hard and soft palates (on the roof of the mouth and toward the throat, respectively), and teeth *have* developed to produce this kind of potential for minute modification of resonant space and vocal articulation.⁴⁴ In addition to the vast developmental changes of the jaw and throat, the ear also changes dramatically throughout the first six years of life. In early postnatal infants, the structures of the head around the auditory apparatus are on a relatively flat plane and bones have not yet fused, or, in some cases, even ossified. Though the auditory apparatus works using the same structural principles in an infant as it does in adults, the apparatus in children is not tipped at as extreme an angle and is not shored up by immovable fused bone, as it is in adults. These changes in angle as children attain adulthood alter the acoustics of the pharynx and sinuses, called the “supralaryngeal space,” the areas in which sound from the larynx is amplified and shaped. This area of resonance is what guides the voicer's sonic curation of vocal timbre, allowing humans to shape their sound into words via sound interactions between the larynx, pharynx and sinuses, the soft and hard palates, and the articulators (teeth, lips, and tongue). And as this angle of bone changes and affords a larger vault at the back of the throat
for resonant space, the auditory canal also tips downward, allowing the ears to drain more effectively into the throat.

Therefore, the lower body's systems of sensation are functionally distinct from the cranial systems of phonation, sound curation, and auditory reception. To experience voiced sound (your own or others') as a "vibratory sensation," it is sensed in structures of the infraclavicular body as well as in the ear canal, and is translated to the cranial mechanisms that react or adjust to it within the nerves, fascia, muscles, and bone of the face. A learned translation requiring training and specific knowledge of one's own anatomy, these minute adjustments also are learned through the integration of encouraged cultural norms and linguistic skill sets.

Just as much as our phonation is a learned set of techniques influenced by, and influencing, physiological structural development throughout our first six years of life, auditory mechanisms that help differentiate between sounds by the perception of timbre are simultaneously forming culturally, learning to perceive sounds as others describe, differentiate, or react to them. In other words, as we learn about soundworlds from our interactions between space and body, we are also learning how to culturally interpret and comprehend those soundworlds, making the less consciously comprehended aspect of sound—timbre—inextricable from the cultural guidance that allows us to interpret sound from a situational and social set of norms and references.

In other work, I have devised the term “diagnostic embodiment” to encompass the ways that choral singers adjust their vocal technique to shape timbre within immediate spatial acoustics and relational group sound mixing. These adjustments are curatorial, nuanced, and often deliberately attempt to influence affective experience of the resulting sounds produced. Vocal diagnostic embodiment is a cyclical set of actions and reactions that are constantly shifting and changing, drawing upon cultural touchstones and techniques—for example, vocal training and memorialized references, metaphors, and connotations—to build a curated performance.

However, the concept of diagnostic embodiment may be expanded to encompass the ways that human bodies feel and hear sounds in space and refract them through cultural lenses in our minds. Even if we, as experiencers, are not sounding our own voices, we are participating in the cyclic process of diagnostic embodiment, because we are aware of our sonic surroundings through our sensoria and constantly catalogue the sounds we hear, translating them into meaning and relating them to emotional and memorialized touchstones. Timbre, as Fales recognizes, is a finely gradated paradigm of sound that humans comprehend more fully with our bodies as percussive and auditory mechanisms than we can translate into nonreferential language. And yet humans are eminently capable of responding to and cherishing the experiences of timbre that we have come to revere through socio-cultural influence and repetition. As human bodies, and particularly the structures of human heads, develop in childhood, humans catalogue our experiences of sound—consciously and subconsciously—as connected with our own bodies' sensoria (infra- and supraclavicular) and respond to timbral changes as we develop our use of larynx, resonators, and articulators in the head. We learn how to alter our own vocal timbre in ways that are culturally complex and instigated, and we learn to respond to timbre as an accomplished timbral shapeshifter, made possible by the expansion of our pharyngeal vault. We (re)inscribe timbre with meaning surreptitiously, as it is sensed
surreptitiously. Because our experience of timbre is often a secret from us via subconscious sensing, the power of timbre is in its conscious inscrutability. This power allows timbre to attach to sonic experiences of sacrality within religious rite, worship, and meditation.

## Immanence, Transcendence, and Sonic Sensoria

After examining timbre in relation to human sonic sensoria and the varied acoustics of religious architecture, we can turn to theological and philosophical debates around music, sound, and the embodied experiences of worship that guide our engagements with timbre. This final section of theoretical discussion will bind together the embodied and architectural considerations of previous sections to discuss how experiences with timbre may tie to specific types of attention within religious praxes.

Theologian, philosopher, and music studies scholar Férdia Stone-Davis illustrates that the concept of transcendence – to “go beyond” everyday modes of attention and connection – has a dual relationship with material manifestations of religious worship. “Transcendence,” she writes, “is either conceived in vertical terms, situated in relation to an ‘absolute’ that lies *beyond* the material, or it is unpacked in horizontal terms, remaining situated *within* the ‘immanent,’ within the material realm and its evanescence.”⁴⁵ Stone-Davis notes that “absolute” transcendence is drawn from timeless constructions of metaphysical realms and powers, whereas “immanent” transcendence is within the material world and a specific temporal reality. Stone-Davis reconciles the vertical and horizontal concepts of transcendence using philosopher Calvin O. Schrag’s term “transversality,” which allows the universality of religious dogmas to coexist with the specific and relational emplacement of experience.⁴⁶ Stone-Davis argues that music should be considered transversal, for several reasons. First, that it upsets divisions between a reified human body and the environment in which it is emplaced. “The music event,” she writes, “relies upon the destabilization of inside and outside, involving the commingling of sound and the human body. Not only is the aural threshold easily trespassed, so is that of the entire body, which internalizes external sounds.” Second, that musical relationship to the physical world and conceptualizations of time resists categorization. And third, that the interplay among sonic production, spatial resonance, embodied reception, and cultural interpretation transgresses immanent and absolute arenas of transcendence.⁴⁷

Because the concept of transcendence can support specific (and exclusionary) concepts of a divine beyond that are created or connected to the physical world through sound, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have been wary in approaching the term. As ethnomusicologists Jeffers Engelhardt and Philip V. Bohlman demur:

> There is a tendency to think in terms of transcendence whenever and wherever the sacrality of sound is at play. This tendency to explain away in terms of transcendence, we suggest, is closely connected to the invention of religion as a sui generis category of privatized, internalized (Protestant Christian) belief and experience cordoned off from the contemporary Western state and public sphere.⁴⁸

They argue that it is not only the specificity of divine “otherness” that is harmful in this conceptualization. The fixity of categorization between sacred and secular within everyday experience is also corrosive in that it promotes specific philosophies of religious alterity and power.
Adopting Schrag’s and Stone-Davis’s concept of transversal, we may circumnavigate
this boundary in considering timbre as a physicalized manifestation of the human
body’s sensorial capacity and limitations of consciousness. Though timbre may be more
transcendent in situations, places, and times in which the experiencer has invested additional
dedication, devotion, and attention—as in religious rite but also so many other areas of life
that encourage heightened meditative attention—it is still present in all facets of human
experience via embodied sensoria and socio-cultural translative awareness. By avoiding
giving certain timbres or sounds absolute meaning or power, scholars may embrace the sonic
panoply of a variety of religious soundscapes, doctrines, and cultural shibboleths. These
specifics may be identified through ethnographic study and archival excavation, and should
allow for the widest possible variation between faith-based systems, rituals, architecture,
cultural context, and a panoply of other considerations. Affective translation of timbral
perception and sensation is always culturally embedded, even if physically experiencing
timbre is beholden to physics and physiology, specificity of location, acuity of sensoria, and
level of attention.

If, as Cornelia Fales argues, sonic experience of timbre exists on the periphery of our
consciousness and can only be described in culturally referential terms but is squarely at the
heart of our subconscious sonic sensoria and vocalization praxes, it is embedded in how we
implicitly understand our bodies' capacities and creative engagement with emplaced acoustics.
Through the heightened attention suggested by many religions in praxes of worship, we are
encouraged to notice our bodily capacities for sound *differently*. We can ascribe a divine
"otherness" to heightened embodied sensations of timbral sound quality. This manifestation
is at the very core of Schrag's transversality, in that the embodied experience of timbre
is both immanent (specific to space, place, time, and body) and absolute (located at the
periphery of consciousness but the center of sensation). In human experiences of it, timbre
resists the wholly cultural through its material connections to space, acoustics, and time. And
yet it rewards meditative consideration of bodily capacity, identity, and emplacement in a
broader social, ecosystemic, and even cosmic or divine beyond. Experiencing timbre, bodies
are transgressed and consumed by an acoustic whole and also separated by individualized
embodied/memorialized alchemies—boundaries between self and other are simultaneously
reified and blurred.

Expanding diagnostic embodiment to encompass the physical/acoustic bodily
engagements with timbre and the cultural connotations and memorializations of timbre that
allow humans to identify and referentially describe timbre, our cyclic engagement with timbre
is ongoing in most experiences of everyday life. It is not sequestered in religious meditative
experience, nor is it totally calculated by either physical or metaphysical points of connection.
It is situational, an artifact of liminal engagement, and physically embedded in ways specific
to each human body. I do argue, however, that the heightened attention of meditative states
encouraged in various ways in different worship praxes may allow us to consider how timbre
intimates affect, shows the capacities and limitations of our bodies, and urges us to consider
our embodied emplacements in faith, meditation, and ethical frameworks.
“I am the vine, ye are the branches”

To wind up the discussion, I turn to another example from my own experience, though this time I am a vocal participant. As a teenager singing with the Master Singers of Virginia in the early 2000s, I was privileged to sing in an eight-member small ensemble, preparing the alto line of composer Arvo Pärt’s “I Am the True Vine,” with text drawn from the biblical Book of St. John. The eight-minute work was written in 1996 for the 900th anniversary of Norwich Cathedral in England and is an extended hocket, where four voice parts—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass—outline arpeggiated chords around G major and E minor. No one voice sings an entire verse, and sometimes a voice is given only one syllable of a word before the next syllable is passed on to another voice. There are no notated dynamics, but the time signature changes so frequently that, in the Universal edition of the score, the number of beats is notated above the staff. The soprano part requires a keen sense of pitch and vocal ability, as the soprano “line” is really a jagged succession of notes conjured without benefit of previous vocal placement; the G above high C frequently must appear out of thin air.

This piece is a meditative experience for listeners, meant particularly for performance in a resonant cathedral acoustic (as the dedication to Norwich Cathedral shows). The experience for the performers is unsettling, for several reasons. Rather than bathing in sonic meditation, the piece requires a vigilance heightened by frequent time signature changes and tuning concerns. If another voice part misses an entry, sings an incorrect or poorly tuned pitch, or holds a note too long, it can cause a cascade of errors in multiple parts, corrupting the delicate construction of the piece. “I Am the True Vine” sounds calm, but the hard labor it requires is anything but tranquil. The resulting experience is disorienting and urged a reliance on the cycle of diagnostic embodiment—my own, and my trust of others’—that created powerful sense memories of the experience tied to negotiations of sound, self, and other in relational, reverberant acoustic space.

Through this hocket, the Arvo Pärt Centre program notes suggest, “the continuum of the alternating voices creates the image of the serpentine vine shoots.”⁴⁹ That illumination is felt differently, and perhaps more potently, in singers’ experiences than in audiences’, emphasizing the overall underlying concept of the work—devotion to and reliance on community. Singing “I am the vine, ye are the branches,” the singer must be simultaneously aware of their own voice, everyone else’s voices, various spatial and acoustic considerations, and adjustments of pitch and timbre; honing, tuning, sweeping through and curling back to Pärt’s central repeated motif. Finding a reasonably similar tone quality between vocal lines was essential to allow the hocket to sound interconnected (which, in most recordings and performances of the work, is displayed as the desired effect). We all had to pay attention to timbre as a defined challenge of the score’s demands, and pay attention to our bodies as sensoria and producers of sound as much as we needed to consistently count and watch for cues. I was beholden to the other singers in a way that I have seldom felt in a choir. Their tone quality and vocal placement was acutely important to my performance. We, as eight singers, became a microcosmic community, leaning on each other, reliant on others for our own identity within the piece—and the audience had an experience we simply could not share with them.
As the ensemble tapped into the system of diagnostic embodiment in an effort to curate timbre, they built a delicate and easily disrupted web of trust between singers and with the conductor thematically connected to the piece itself. The biblical lyrics from John 15 toward the end of the work make this clear: “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.” The religious aspects of the work, referential to the text set, certainly connect to ideas of self-sacrifice, trust, and community investment. I could comprehend this consciously. But my sensations within this performance— affectively sensational and emotional—felt as if they had a power of their own, one just outside my conscious reach. This was, I believe, due to the timbral paradox, feeding into transversal reification/dissolution of self and other. Shaped by the constantly cycling implicit process of diagnostic embodiment, my own invested attention to body and acoustic made the mechanisms of timbre elemental and divine.

I have chosen to end this article with my own reflexive memorialized experience, now over 20 years after it happened, to demonstrate how embodiment and engagement with timbre can create strong embodied and spatialized memories that are interwoven with religious, cultural, and ethical meaning. While Pärt’s piece is not automatically “understood,” “felt,” or “experienced” in the same ways by every other body that participates or receives the sounds, my own memorialization contains vestiges of the working parts interacting throughout this article. My aim is not to claim that everyone will perceive timbre in the same way. Rather, it is to show the potency of timbral sensation and negotiation in shared acoustic space. Power in honed self-reflexive attention to sound, space, and body—imbricated in a constant cycle of diagnostic embodiment—can be understood and harnessed in entirely different ways. Embodied negotiations within this cycle have a power all their own, acknowledged through “inner” experience of embodied sensation and adjustment. What Fales identifies as “timbral paradox” allows us to sense and acknowledge bodily capacity, move beyond our conscious understanding of the physical world we inhabit, and create our own culturally imbued narratives about the meaning of this experience of transcendence.

## NOTES

<footnote n="1">1 See Cornelia Fales, “The Paradox of Timbre,” *Ethnomusicology* 46/1 (2002): 56–95.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Nina Sun Eidsheim, *Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice* (Duke University Press, 2015), 161.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Fales, “The Paradox of Timbre,” 58.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 See Joy Damousi and Paula Hamilton, *A Cultural History of Sound, Memory and the Senses* (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), especially the chapters by Bruce Johnson (“Sound Studies Today: Where Are We Going?” 7–22) and Lauren Istvandity (“‘If Ever I Hear It, It Takes Me Straight Back There:’ Music, Autobiographical Memory, Space and Place,” 231–44).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Steven Feld, “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,” in Keith H. Basso and Steven Feld, eds., *Senses of Place* (School of American Research Press, 1996), 91–135.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Lila Ellen Gray, “Listening for Affect: Musical Ethnography and the Challenge of/to Affect,” *Cultural Theory and Critique* 61/2–3 (2020): 321.</footnote>
7. Ibid., 322. To support these assertions, Gray cites William Mazzarella, "Affect: What Is It Good For?" in *Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization*, ed. Saurabh Dube (Routledge, 2009), 291-309; Roger Mathew Grant, "Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects," *Representations* 144/1 (2018): 34-60, at 52; Ana Hofman, "The Affective Turn in Ethnomusicology," *Muzikologija* 18 (2015): 35-55; and Yael Navaro, "Diversifying Affect," *Cultural Anthropology* 32/2 (2017): 209-14.

8. Recent scholarship has addressed the neutrality of sound and affect related to sound in religion from several angles: ethnomusicologist Mark Porter shows that music can be considered as a bridge between congregational music styles and ethics for those who practice within a religious framework. However, the presupposition of totalized ethics in the affective and physical experiences of sound—i.e., that experiences of music and sound can be inherently “good,” “right,” or “ethical” — is supported by numerous scholars, including Gray and Hofman (see note 7 above). A similar argument is put forth by Jeffers Engelhardt, Kate Bancroft, Alex Rule, and Charlotte Wang about choral vocalism, which they urge should be seen as a set of “ethically neutral” praxes. See Mark Porter, *Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives* (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017); and Jeffers Engelhardt et al., “Chorality’s Social-Sonic Relationships,” *Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture* 3/1 (2022): 76-97.

9. Eugenia Siegel Conte, "'Here in This Generous Room': Space, Voice, and the Curation of Affect in Euro-American Choralism" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2023), 57.

10. Michael Bull and Jon P. Mitchell, eds., *Ritual, Performance, and the Senses* (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), 4.

11. Phillip B. Zarrilli, "'Inner Movement' between Practices of Meditation, Martial Arts, and Acting: A Focused Examination of Affect, Feeling, Sensing, and Sensory Attunement," in ibid., 125.

12. Ibid. Bull and Mitchell discuss how the body/mind binary has been reinscribed by studies of religion in cognitive science and through focus on semiotics and iconicity in ritual.

13. Férdia J. Stone-Davis, *Music and Transcendence* (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group), 1.

14. Ethnomusicologist Max Jack defines atmosphere as “the overlapping and competing relationships between affect, emotion, ideology, and space,” and continues that “music in particular underscores the malleability of atmosphere, influencing the dynamic and shifting vibe of a place, what actors are doing, and how their demeanors change in time.” Max Jack, “The Crowd in Flux: Atmosphere and the Governance of Public Affects at FC Union Berlin,” *Ethnomusicology* 65/3 (2021): 502.

15. See Fales, "The Paradox of Timbre," 56-95.

16. Use of the term * stylized * is deliberate in this case, as scholars have discussed musical approach and style in religious worship as an entrée to community membership, trust, and understanding. See Timothy Rommen, *Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad* (University of California Press, 2007); Jeffers Engelhardt, *Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia* (Oxford University Press, 2015); and Jonathan Dueck, *Congregational Music, Conflict and Community* (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018).

17. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, "An Inventory of Shimmers," in *The Affect Theory Reader* (Duke University Press, 2010), 1.

18. Embodied experience is certainly not exclusive to humans. Work by ecomusicologists suggests that other sentient entities and forms are not exempt from sensation or affective experiences, but my article focuses on the cultural-physical nexus of human interactions with sound. See Georgina Born, "On Nonhuman Sound-Sound as Relation," in James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow, eds., *Sound Objects* (Duke University Press, 2018), 185-207.

19. Perhaps some of the best work available regarding differences in sonic embodiment is found in the intersection of music studies with disability studies, a field that has seen great expansion and deepening in recent years. See Blake Howe et al., *The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies* (Oxford University Press, 2015) for an overview of this burgeoning field of scholarship. Numerous articles and case studies show the breadth of consideration that is warranted around an idealized “normal” body; see, for example, Joseph Straus, “Music Theory’s Therapeutic Imperative and the Tyranny of the Normal,” *Music Theory Spectrum* 43/2 (Fall 2021): 339-48; and David Vanderhamm, “‘I’m Just an Armless Guitarist’: Tony Melendez, Disability, and the Social Construction of Virtuosity,” *Journal of the Society for American Music* 14/3 (August 2020): 280-307.

20. Ethnomusicologist Mark Porter writes that work “bring[ing] together a grounded examination of the music of the church with theological examination operating on a similar human scale is an area which has yet to be fully explored,” and this approach expands upon this mission by working underneath the cultural specificities of music to address sound, acoustics, and embodiment in religious music as an important layer of musical mechanisms in devotional worship. Mark Porter, “The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies,” *Ecclesial Practices* 1/2 (2014): 152.
21 Here Fales cites Robert A. Butler’s “The Relative Influence of Pitch and Timbre on the Apparent Location of Sound in the Median Sagittal Plane,” *Perception & Psychophysics* 14/2: 255–58.

22 Fales, “The Paradox of Timbre,” 57–58.

23 Ibid., 58.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Conte, “Here in This Generous Room,” 24. I make the case that contemporary choralism—indeed, most choral praxes after the turn of the nineteenth century—can be considered as having underlying colonial and imperial goals to support the formation and maintenance of nation-states and normalized colonial reach, in part due to the religious transcendence presupposed to suffuse choral praxes of European Christian derivation.

27 The easiest way to try this for yourself is to say/sing an “oo” vowel (International Phonetic Association “u”) and, while continuing to sound, switch to an “ü” vowel (IPA ʊ). Not only does the timbral quality change the vowel—so does the highlight of pitched partials in the overtone series, producing a slight change in perceived pitch due to an alteration in activated overtones.

28 The King’s Singers, “What’s going on inside our heads . . .,” Facebook video post, February 28, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/kingssingers/videos/725846682863644 (accessed March 2, 2024). Only five singers are featured in this video as one of the six, Nicholas Ashby, was on paternity leave for the upcoming tour, and the group was adjusting their repertoire for five voices.

29 Byrd was a well-known practicing Catholic during the reign of Elizabeth I, which was considered a crime against queen and state due to the establishment of the Church of England. Byrd’s music is frequently dissected for anti-Church of England sentiments alongside references to papal authority in Rome; see Jeremy L. Smith, “William Byrd’s Fall from Grace and His First Solo Publication of 1588: Shostakovian ‘Response to Just Criticism?’” *Music & Politics* 1/1 (Winter 2007), https://doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0001.104; and David Trendell, “Aspects of William Byrd’s Musical Recusancy,” *Musical Times* 148/1900 (Autumn 2007): 27–50. The King’s Singers know this history, and certainly often sing in similar resonant spaces, as the group was founded by several King’s College, Cambridge, choristers. Their knowledge about Byrd, the texts they are singing, and ways of negotiating acoustic performance spaces are certainly wrapped into their timbral shaping. However, at the root of the nuanced and fine work around their vocal blend and aggregate tone quality is their hearing, and feeling, of the sounds they are creating within their bodies, amplified in space. The choices they make around timbre for performance are informed by innumerable factors, but all of them are influenced by the sensations and auditory experience of the sounds they create, and by their adjustments to technique in real time as they shape their creation.

30 Fales, “The Paradox of Timbre,” 24.

31 See the essays in Michael Frishkopf and Federico Spinetti, eds., *Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam* (University of Texas Press, 2018), particularly Spinetti’s “Of Mirrors and Frames: Music, Sound, and Architecture at the Iranian *Zūrkhāneh*” (356–84), Samer Akkach’s “Aural Geometry: Poetry, Music, and Architecture in the Arabic Tradition” (166–98), and Saida Daukeyeva’s “The Social and Sacred Microcosm of the *Kiiz Ūi*: Space and Sound in Rituals for the Dead among the Kazakhs of Mongolia” (308–38).

32 Alain Corbin, *Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside* (Columbia University Press, 1998).

33 Emily Thompson, *The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933* (MIT Press, 2004), 180–90.

34 Christine Guillebaud and Catherine Lavandier, eds., *Worship Sound Spaces: Architecture, Acoustics and Anthropology* (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020) features several chapters about Hindu temple soundscapes in different geographical contexts (see chapters by Gérard Colas, Astrid Zotter, and Christine Guillebaud) and acoustics in historical and current Muslim spaces of worship outside of the Middle East, Europe, or North America (see chapters by Ahmed Elkhateeb, Andrew J. Eisenberg, and Amit J. Wahurwagh, Akshay P. Patil, and Alpana R. Dongre).

35 Dongxu Zhang et al., “Soundscape in Religious Historical Buildings: A Review,” *Heritage Science* 12/45 (2024), https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-024-01148-x. The article is a collation of scholarship about soundscape within religious architecture in a variety of milieus, including Buddhist temples in China, Japan, and Korea. The researchers note, however, that the mode of data collection within worship spaces often changed to emphasize the value systems of the religion for which they were built. For example, natural sounds—birdsong
and wind—were considered important in Buddhist temples, though not in other religious architectural contexts. The researchers emphasized findings of acoustical measurement and engineering, but I argue that the cultural information that these “biased” findings displayed is an important component of understanding *why* sound matters the way it does within systems of faith and worship.

36 Jean-Paul Thibauld, “Afterword: A World of Attunements,” in Guillebaud and Lavandier, *Worship Sound Spaces*, 212.

37 Ibid., 214.

38 Attention to structures of “the body” may specifically be missing from this literature not only because it relies on specialist medical knowledge, much of which is outside the traditional scope of ethno/musicological scholarship, but also because it is often derided as overly general or even stereotypical in ways that might undercut the importance of specific cultural understandings of bodily structures. Rather than ignoring different bodily concepts or structures, this discussion of medical-idealized anatomy could provide a foothold for nuanced discussion of how different bodies are conceptualized, used, and renegotiated.

39 See Jeff Todd Titon, “Thoreau’s Ear,” *Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal* 1/1 (2015): 144–54; Aaron S. Allen, “Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology,” *Journal of the American Musicological Society* 64/2 (2011): 391–94; and Brian Alexander Karvelas, “Composing with the Land: Permaculture Listening Practices and Grotesque Ecologies” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2023). The focus on human experience in this article is not meant to set human bodies apart as inherently more developed or richer than other living creatures and entities; rather, because this work is centered around human cultural and spiritual experience, I must discuss the human sensorium/sensoria to show how the structures of a medically idealized body (see note 38 above) may engage with sound in acoustic space, and how those experiences may be contextualized through cultural systems. In their forays into ecomusicology, a field that foregrounds experience in the animal/natural world, ecomusicologists strive to decentralize notions of “experience” as a predominantly human sensory phenomenon. See Titon and the colloquy moderated by Allen in the *Journal of the American Musicological Society* for an introduction to this developing movement. Also, the concept of the grotesque, a term referring to interconnectivity of human experience with agents of the natural world—and, according to ethnomusicologist Brian Alexander Karvelas, interspecies creation and experience of sound—shows that sound studies has much to reconsider regarding how we have historically separated humanity from other lifeforms’ experiences of sound and music. This has often been under the suggestion that humans have a “soul” and animals do not, and religious persecution and the dehumanization and massacre of Indigenous people has often been perpetrated by implying that “soul” is what separates civilization from other living things, a notion that is important to historiographically acknowledge and refute in current scholarship around sound and religion.

40 See Petros C. Benias et al., “Structure and Distribution of an Unrecognized Interstitium in Human Tissues,” *Scientific Reports* 8/4947 (2018), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23062-6.

41 See Frank H. Willard et al., “The Thoracolumbar Fascia: Anatomy, Function, and Clinical Observations,” *Journal of Anatomy* 221 (2012): 507–36.

42 Frank H. Willard, “Integration in Anatomy: Interoceptive & Fascial Systems of Trunk & Head,” presentation delivered at the American Academy of Osteopathy Convocation, Colorado Springs, CO, March 13, 2020.

43 Kurt Heinking, “Ch 28A: Head Region,” in Michael Seffinger, ed., *Principles of Osteopathic Medicine*, 4th ed. (Elsevier, 2021).

44 Jane E. Carreiro, *An Osteopathic Approach to Children*, 2nd ed. (Churchill Livingstone Elsevier, 2009), 65–66.

45 Stone-Davis, *Music and Transcendence*, 1.

46 Ibid., 5.

47 Ibid., 4–5.

48 Jeffers Engelhardt and Philip V. Bohlman, *Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual* (Oxford University Press, 2016), 4.

49 Arvo Pärt Centre, “Works: I Am the True Vine,” https://www.arvopart.ee/en/arvo-part/work/498/ (accessed July 6, 2025).