The beauty of sound: Timbre as grounds for aesthetic and artistic value in music

This thesis explores the concept of timbre through the lens of analytic philosophical

aesthetics and philosophy of music. I argue that timbre should be thought of as providing the

grounds for artistic and aesthetic values in music. To this end and firstly, I critique the

physical sense of timbre in favour of two anti-realist senses of timbre. These two are the

qualitative and the semantic senses which are developed from two of Siedenburg and

McAdams’ four senses of timbre (Siedenburg & McAdams, 2017). I argue that the qualitative

sense of timbre is the experience of the unique qualities of sounds. The semantic sense is that

which associates timbres to objects and concepts. Within the semantic sense, I argue for what

I call a genealogical sense of timbre which relates timbres to sources and concepts through a

history of built up associations. Secondly, these two senses are situated within the artform of

music by demonstrating the functions they may fulfil there and how these ground artistic and

aesthetic values. Regarding these values, I employ Robert Stecker’s definitions of artistic and

aesthetic value. (Stecker, 2019) Finally, I summarise the two arguments for why we should

think that timbre can provide grounds for aesthetic and artistic value in music.