For the conference, which dealt with spatial models of timbre in the broadest sense, international experts could be found as speakers: Charalampos SAITIS, Maria MANNONE, Kai SIEDENBURG, Christoph REUTER, Dieter MAURER.
The topics and research questions of the conference ranged from psycho acoustic to technological and philosophical approaches to an aspect of sound perception which is sometimes called a “multidimensional dimension”. The fundamental categories of tone, colour, space, time and movement seem to evaporate when we try to fathom their essence. Derived notions such as time space, timbre (“sound colour”), hue (“colour tone”), tonal space and space-time are therefore not spared ambiguities and vagueness either. Whereas spatial models for pitch (“tone height”) have a long history, to date no reliable spaces for timbre could be established unequivocally. Although the timbre space metaphor conjectured by John Grey and the visualisations from his writings (1977/1978) are depicted in many introductions to musical acoustics, timbre is far from being a universally valid spatial feature of musical sounds.
