Timbre and meaning: Cognitive strategies for perceiving the musical content of a vocal work (by the example of S. V. Rachmaninoff’s romance “How Nice It Is Here”)

The purpose of the study is to identify how the listener perception of the musical content of a vocal work is built when the timbre component changes at the stage of its performing interpretation. The article will compare various versions of S. V. Rachmaninoff’s romance “How Nice It Is Here”, which not only strictly materialize the original composer’s text in sound, but also make various timbre changes to it, as well as analyze various strategies of listener perception associated with changing the timbre-acoustic appearance of the work. The scientific novelty lies in the comprehensive consideration of the issue, combining the approaches of psychoacoustics, psychology of perception, sound engineering with traditional musicological research methods. Based on the methodological approach of E. V. Nazaikinsky, who separates the actual sound principle of music from intonation, as well as on the results of his own research on the role of timbre in fixation, translation and perception of musical content, acoustic, neurocognitive and semantic aspects of this process are revealed. As a result, it was determined that any timbre changes made by performers to the original text of a vocal composition lead not only to a variation in its acoustic parameters, but also to a transformation of perception of the content represented by it.