Sound Galleries

Each sound gallery is an album of audio tracks, in the old black vinyl sense of the word. Each collection is about one hour of material.

Hover the mouse pointer over the SONIC button on the left to access the sound galleries.

We invite you to dive into the various "sound sculpture" tracks in the sound galleries. While you're listening, you may wish to gaze at the abstract visual accompaniments that emerge behind closed eyes. Note that there is not a specific visual intention behind any of this sonic material, although some day there might be.

If you wish to read about these compositions while listening to them, you can find an ever-expanding dithyramb concerning sound, hearing, spatial perception, creation, and Vedanta in the mental section of this site.

Our personal recommendation is to close your eyes, and just let the brain give up. This is probably the best course of action in most situations anyway.

About the Downloads

Each track is available for download on the sound gallery pages in MP3 form. Some pieces were composed for special 8-channel gallery installations, and are not available here in their original form. However, we have made special binaural conversions of these pieces so that with headphones much of the original spatial experience can stiill be enjoyed. (More on binaural in the Mental section of this site.)

To download the files, usually all you need to do is click the links on the album pages. If this doesn't seem to work (or if you get annoying popups from your browser add-ins), just do this:

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Right-click the link.
Choose "Save target as..."

FireFox Browser

Right-click the link.
Choose "Save link as..."

Sound Quality

These Timbre compositions are not designed for tiny computer speakers, especially those without subwoofers. Although we provide fairly decent MP3 download versions for minimum transfer time, listeners who prefer a full-frequency experience may download the much larger, losslessly-compressed files available for selected tracks. The recommended listening environment for these recordings is a pair of Magnepan MG-IIIa panels with dual subwoofer reinforcement, active crossovers, Krell bi-amping, and a very large comfortable room without any neighbors. In lieu of that, we recommend headphones like the Sennheiser HD-600 or better. Finally, if for some reason you don't feel like getting special audio equipment and remodeling your livingroom to listen to these tracks, then just crank up the volume and enjoy.

Lossless Tracks

Most Timbre recordings rely on better-than-average fidelity of reproduction; squashed MP3 simply can't capture the full subtlety of the work. This is especially true of the binaural tracks -- binaural recordings are significantly more effective in recreating realistic acoustic space when heard without any compression at all (and of course they must be played back on headphones). To accommodate this, lossless versions of a few selected tracks are available encoded in Monkey’s Audio format, one of the first and still the best. The decoder for APE lossless audio files can be found here. Any of the collections can be prepared as full-quality music CD's if you ask me in a nice way (please write to info, at timbreproductions dot com).

[return to sound gallery buttons]

(P)©Copyright 2003 Allen Cobb. All rights reserved. All text, audio, and images are owned by the copyright holder. Downloading excerpts, tracks, thumbnails or larger versions does not convey any rights to store, reproduce, modify, or distribute these works. For commercial use of any kind, direct or indirect, written permission is required from the copyright holder.