Cultural Timbre as Unvoiced Knowing: An Audiovisual Spectral Synthesizer That Transforms Chinese Musical Instruments

SonoChrom is an installation based on an audiovisual spectral timbre synthesizer made out of four traditional Chinese music instruments. The installation demonstrates how sonic timbre is connected to a specific culture, activates unvoiced knowing, and bears potential for expressivity similar to that of a human voice. Timbre – sometimes under-used given a widespread dominance of pitch, rhythm, or musical tone – might matter in everyday (technological) culture as a signifier of, and activator for, unvoiced cultural knowledge. Encounters with particular timbres can activate embodied memories and personal associations.Inspiring a shift in thinking towards a timbre-first, culturally situated, and multi-sensory interaction model, the authors present a digital installation, in which audiences play with remodeled sounds of Chinese instruments. In ancient Chinese aesthetic discourses, timbre is framed as an expressive device similar to the human voice, as a parameter through which thought and emotion can be conveyed with immediacy and depth. Through recording sessions, a corpus of samples was created and spectrally decomposed into partials – which are then recombined in hyper-realistic ways in the installation. A screen-based, aestheticized visualization based on the shapes of the four instruments renders timbral changes as evolving motion textures.This paper documents the installation and advances a timbre-first approach, arguing that technologically shaped timbre, when deployed as an interactional device, offers significant potential for contemporary digital applications. As a multi-sensory system, SonoChrom offers experiential engagement with Chinese sound culture through timbre and visualizations.