The communicative artistic-semiotic function of timbre in musical perception

The aim of the study is to expand the understanding of musical timbre and to examine one of its most important artistic and semiotic functions, which determines the ability of music to serve as a means of artistic communication. The paper analyzes in detail the essential properties of timbre, which allow it to activate the mechanisms of acoustic information perception and sound image formation that are common to everyday and music perception. Timbre has been isolated from the system of expressive means of the musical language and considered as a sign endowed with communicative meanings. The author’s semiotic approach to the study of individual linguistic means of music determines the scientific novelty of the article. The study revealed that the basic essential properties of timbre activate universal processes of human perception and processing of sound information, which determine the objectivity and integrity of one’s perception of both the acoustic picture of the surrounding world and music as its artistic representation. The psychoacoustic materiality, integrality of timbre, and its ability to evoke related inmodal sensations, as well as to activate the key mechanism of formation, consolidation, and actualization of sound semantics – associativity – have a complex “controlling effect” (V. V. Medushevsky) on the perception of music’s sonic scale-time layer. This gives us reason to consider timbre an important multifunctional sign in the system of musical language, which actively participates in the realization of the communicative artistic-semiotic function of music.