Dark sound : being and timbre in Gothic

In a music-aesthetic approach to Gothic based on Hans Gumbrecht’s notion of atmosphere and Jean-François Lyotard’s negotiation of the timbral sublime, my paper argues that timbre’s veiled vibrations are at the heart of Gothic darkness. Because the musicological and philosophical understanding of timbre remains largely mysterious, it does not just represent darkness: it also affords the shadows through which Gothic is defined and in which it hides