Timbre Tools: Ethnographic Perspectives on Timbre and Sonic Cultures in Hackathon Designs

Timbre is a nuanced yet abstractly defined concept. Its inherently subjective qualities make it challenging to design and work with. In this paper, we propose to explore the conceptualisation and negoti- ation of timbre within the creative practice of timbre tool makers. To this end, we hosted a hackathon event and performed an ethnographic study to explore how participants engaged with the notion of timbre and how their conception of timbre was shaped through social interactions and technological encounters. We present individual descriptions of each team’s design process and reflect on our data to identify commonalities in the ways that timbre is understood and informed by sound technologies and their surrounding sonic cultures, e.g., by relating concepts of timbre to metaphors. We further current understanding by offering novel interdisciplinary and multimodal insights into understandings of timbre.