Timbre is one of the elements that make up the history of musical modernity, a history that leads from music to sound. Other elements are equally important: noise (with which timbre forms a kind of dialectic); listening (thinking in terms of timbre or sound implies a paradigmatic shift in listening); the idea of composing (composing sound or timbre, i.e. not taking them to be natural categories); the sensation of immersion and space (which emphasises the materiality of sound). The notion of timbre was very important at a central moment in this history, in the 1970s and 80s (particularly with spectral music). One might have thought that, thereafter, it would have disappeared, leaving the concepts of sound, noise or space to take precedence. This was not the case. Not only does it continue to be used to this day in studies of perception; it is also now used in other fields such as ethnomusicology. How can this resilience of the notion of timbre be explained? I will hypothesise here that the term has retained its relevance because, while introducing to the new materialism that characterises the emergence of a culture centred on sound, it allows us to retain the strength of the hermeneutic tradition of music.