Date/Time: Friday 2nd December,
4pm, Rm 1.06, Common Room, Alison House.
Dr Alistair Isaac: Musical Practice as a Philosophy Experiment: The Case of Timbre.
[Institute for Music in Human and Social Development (IMHSD)]
Abstract
Timbre is that quality of a sound which distinguishes it other than its pitch and volume. Philosophers and psychologists have tried to determine (i) which timbre categories we can perceive; and (ii) how these categories relate to each other. I argue that practices of music composition (especially but not exclusively those of electronic music) implicitly endorse philosophical / psychological theories about timbre perception. As such, the "success" of these compositions (in achieving the desired musical effect on the audience) can be understood as a kind of natural experiment, providing evidence about the particular theories of timbre perception they presuppose.
Biography
Alistair Isaac received his PhD from Stanford in 2010, and has been a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh since 2013, following postdoctoral fellowships at Michigan and Penn. His research is primarily in the Philosophy of Psychology, and he is especially interested in how the science of perception can inform philosophical questions about the phenomenology and epistemology of perceptual experience. His interest in auditory experience dates to a previous life composing electronic music, and his current research aims to combine considerations from music synthesis and composition with those from the philosophy and psychophysics of sound