![Aspects of music illustration](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Aspects_of_music_illustration.png)
Traditionally in
Western music, a musical tone is a steady
periodic sound. A musical tone is characterized by its
duration
Duration may refer to:
* The amount of time elapsed between two events
* Duration (music) – an amount of time or a particular time interval, often cited as one of the fundamental aspects of music
* Duration (philosophy) – a theory of time and ...
,
pitch,
intensity (or
loudness
In acoustics, loudness is the subjectivity, subjective perception of sound pressure. More formally, it is defined as, "That attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which sounds can be ordered on a scale extending from quiet to loud". The rel ...
), and
timbre
In music, timbre ( ), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or musical tone, tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voice ...
(or quality). The
note
Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to:
Music and entertainment
* Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music
* ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian
* ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened version ...
s used in
music
Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...
can be more complex than musical tones, as they may include aperiodic aspects, such as attack
transients
Transience or transient may refer to:
Music
* ''Transient'' (album), a 2004 album by Gaelle
* ''Transience'' (Steven Wilson album), 2015
* Transience (Wreckless Eric album)
Science and engineering
* Transient state, when a process variable or ...
,
vibrato
Vibrato (Italian language, Italian, from past participle of "wikt:vibrare, vibrare", to vibrate) is a musical effect consisting of a regular, pulsating change of pitch (music), pitch. It is used to add expression to vocal and instrumental music. ...
, and
envelope modulation.
A simple tone, or
pure tone
Pure may refer to:
Computing
* A pure function
* A pure virtual function
* PureSystems, a family of computer systems introduced by IBM in 2012
* Pure Software, a company founded in 1991 by Reed Hastings to support the Purify tool
* Pure-FTPd, ...
, has a
sinusoidal
A sine wave, sinusoidal wave, or just sinusoid is a mathematical curve defined in terms of the '' sine'' trigonometric function, of which it is the graph. It is a type of continuous wave and also a smooth periodic function. It occurs often in m ...
waveform
In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its graph as a function of time, independent of its time and magnitude scales and of any displacement in time.David Crecraft, David Gorham, ''Electronic ...
. A complex tone is a combination of two or more pure tones that have a periodic pattern of repetition, unless specified otherwise.
The
Fourier theorem
A Fourier series () is a summation of harmonically related sinusoidal functions, also known as components or harmonics. The result of the summation is a periodic function whose functional form is determined by the choices of cycle length (or ''p ...
states that any periodic waveform can be approximated as closely as desired as the sum of a series of sine waves with frequencies in a
harmonic series and at specific
phase
Phase or phases may refer to:
Science
*State of matter, or phase, one of the distinct forms in which matter can exist
*Phase (matter), a region of space throughout which all physical properties are essentially uniform
* Phase space, a mathematic ...
relationships to each other. The common denominator frequency, which is also often the lowest of these frequencies is the
fundamental frequency
The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the ''fundamental'', is defined as the lowest frequency of a periodic waveform. In music, the fundamental is the musical pitch of a note that is perceived as the lowest partial present. In ...
, and is also the inverse of the period of the waveform. The fundamental frequency determines the pitch of the tone, which is perceived by the human hearing. In music, notes are assigned to tones with different fundamental frequencies, in order to describe the pitch of played tones.
History
Tones were recognised by
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
philosopher
Aristoxenus
Aristoxenus of Tarentum ( el, Ἀριστόξενος ὁ Ταραντῖνος; born 375, fl. 335 BC) was a Greek Peripatetic philosopher, and a pupil of Aristotle. Most of his writings, which dealt with philosophy, ethics and music, have been ...
(375-335 BCE), who called them "tensions".
[ tonografia1841, p. 37]
See also
*
Mathematics of musical scales
Music theory analyzes the pitch, timing, and structure of music. It uses mathematics to study elements of music such as tempo, chord progression, form, and meter. The attempt to structure and communicate new ways of composing and hearing music ...
*
Reference tone A reference tone is a pure tone corresponding to a known frequency, and produced at a stable sound pressure level (volume), usually by specialized equipment.
In media
The most common reference tone in audio engineering is a at −20 dB. It is ...
*
Standard test tone A reference tone is a pure tone corresponding to a known frequency, and produced at a stable sound pressure level (volume), usually by specialized equipment.
In media
The most common reference tone in audio engineering is a at −20 dB. It is ...
*
Signal tone
In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The ''IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing'' ...
*
White noise
In signal processing, white noise is a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies, giving it a constant power spectral density. The term is used, with this or similar meanings, in many scientific and technical disciplines, ...
References
Citations
Works cited
*
External links
Pure tones & complex sounds
Hearing
Music theory
Musical notation
Pitch (music)
Sounds by type
Tone, EQ and filter
Waves
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