The article examines the current ideas about the timbre of instrumental sound as a scientific and artistic phenomenon. It presents musicologists’ observations on its role in the organisation of musical material, its various internal and external manifestations. Particular emphasis is placed on to the participation of timbre — a situational sign — in the semantisation of sound, semantic organisation and historical evolution of the instrumental text in different eras. Its systemic functions in the processes of sound production by the performer and perception by the listener are emphasised. Based on the analysis of new scientific achievements, the author draws the most important conclusion about the archetypal properties of timbre, aimed at immanent musical and integration processes, the intonational embodiment of the image of the world and the modality of the psychology of auditory perception. This opens up the possibility of studying the semantic potential of timbre-acoustic and symbolic structures of a musical text, contributes to the expansion of the methodological range of scientific comprehension of its content, as well as to the creation of unique performance interpretations.
Irina V. Alekseeva (2025) studied this question.