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In music, timbre ( ), also known as tone color or tone quality (from
psychoacoustics
Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of sound perception and audiology—how humans perceive various sounds. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated wi ...
), is the perceived sound quality of a
musical note
In music, a note is the representation of a musical sound.
Notes can represent the pitch and duration of a sound in musical notation. A note can also represent a pitch class.
Notes are the building blocks of much written music: discretizatio ...
, sound or
tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musical instruments. It also enables listeners to distinguish different instruments in the same category (e.g., an
oboe
The oboe ( ) is a type of double reed woodwind instrument. Oboes are usually made of wood, but may also be made of synthetic materials, such as plastic, resin, or hybrid composites. The most common oboe plays in the treble or soprano range.
...
and a
clarinet, both
woodwind instruments).
In simple terms, timbre is what makes a particular musical instrument or human voice have a different sound from another, even when they play or sing the same note. For instance, it is the difference in sound between a guitar and a piano playing the same note at the same volume. Both instruments can sound equally tuned in relation to each other as they play the same note, and while playing at the same amplitude level each instrument will still sound distinctively with its own unique tone color. Experienced musicians are able to distinguish between different instruments of the same type based on their varied timbres, even if those instruments are playing notes at the same fundamental
pitch and loudness.
The physical characteristics of sound that determine the perception of timbre include frequency
spectrum
A spectrum (plural ''spectra'' or ''spectrums'') is a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary, without gaps, across a continuum. The word was first used scientifically in optics to describe the rainbow of colors ...
and
envelope
An envelope is a common packaging item, usually made of thin, flat material. It is designed to contain a flat object, such as a letter or card.
Traditional envelopes are made from sheets of paper cut to one of three shapes: a rhombus, a sh ...
. Singers and instrumental musicians can change the timbre of the music they are singing/playing by using different singing or playing techniques. For example, a violinist can use different bowing styles or play on different parts of the string to obtain different timbres (e.g., playing
sul tasto
A variety of musical terms are likely to be encountered in printed scores, music reviews, and program notes. Most of the terms are Italian, in accordance with the Italian origins of many European musical conventions. Sometimes, the special mus ...
produces a light, airy timbre, whereas playing
sul ponticello
A variety of musical terms are likely to be encountered in Sheet music, printed scores, music reviews, and program notes. Most of the terms Italian musical terms used in English, are Italian, in accordance with the Italian origins of many Europea ...
produces a harsh, even and aggressive tone). On electric guitar and electric piano, performers can change the timbre using
effects unit
An effects unit or effects pedal is an electronic device that alters the sound of a musical instrument or other audio source through audio signal processing.
Common effects include distortion/overdrive, often used with electric guitar in el ...
s and
graphic equalizer
Equalization, or simply EQ, in sound recording and reproduction is the process of adjusting the volume of different frequency bands within an audio signal. The circuit or equipment used to achieve this is called an equalizer.
Most hi-fi eq ...
s.
Synonyms
''Tone quality'' and ''tone color'' are synonyms for ''timbre'', as well as the "''texture'' attributed to a single instrument". However, the word
texture
Texture may refer to:
Science and technology
* Surface texture, the texture means smoothness, roughness, or bumpiness of the surface of an object
* Texture (roads), road surface characteristics with waves shorter than road roughness
* Texture ...
can also refer to the type of music, such as
multiple, interweaving melody lines versus
a singable melody accompanied by subordinate chords.
Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (31 August 1821 – 8 September 1894) was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The Helmholtz Associatio ...
used the German ''Klangfarbe'' (''tone color''), and
John Tyndall proposed an English translation, ''clangtint'', but both terms were disapproved of by
Alexander Ellis, who also discredits ''register'' and ''color'' for their pre-existing English meanings. Determined by its frequency composition, the sound of a musical instrument may be described with words such as ''bright'', ''dark'', ''warm'', ''harsh'', and other terms. There are also
colors of noise
In audio engineering, electronics, physics, and many other fields, the color of noise or noise spectrum refers to the power spectrum of a noise signal (a signal produced by a stochastic process). Different colors of noise have significantly ...
, such as
pink
Pink is the color of a namesake flower that is a pale tint of red. It was first used as a color name in the late 17th century. According to surveys in Europe and the United States, pink is the color most often associated with charm, politeness, ...
and
white
White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White o ...
. In visual representations of sound, timbre corresponds to the shape of the image, while loudness corresponds to brightness; pitch corresponds to the y-shift of the spectrogram.
ASA definition
The
Acoustical Society of America
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary org ...
(ASA) Acoustical Terminology definition 12.09 of timbre describes it as "that attribute of auditory sensation which enables a listener to judge that two nonidentical sounds, similarly presented and having the same loudness and
pitch, are dissimilar", adding, "Timbre depends primarily upon the frequency spectrum, although it also depends upon the sound pressure and the temporal characteristics of the sound".
Attributes
Many commentators have attempted to decompose timbre into component attributes. For example, J. F. Schouten (1968, 42) describes the "elusive attributes of timbre" as "determined by at least five major acoustic parameters", which
Robert Erickson
Robert Erickson (March 7, 1917 – April 24, 1997) was an American composer.
Education
Erickson was born in Marquette, Michigan. He studied with Ernst Krenek from 1936 to 1947: "I had already studied—and abandoned—the twelve tone sys ...
finds, "scaled to the concerns of much contemporary music":
# Range between
tonal and noiselike character
#
Spectral envelope
The power spectrum S_(f) of a time series x(t) describes the distribution of power into frequency components composing that signal. According to Fourier analysis, any physical signal can be decomposed into a number of discrete frequencies, o ...
#
Time envelope in terms of rise, duration, and decay (ADSR, which stands for "attack, decay, sustain, release")
# Changes both of
spectral envelope
The power spectrum S_(f) of a time series x(t) describes the distribution of power into frequency components composing that signal. According to Fourier analysis, any physical signal can be decomposed into a number of discrete frequencies, o ...
(formant-glide) and
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. I ...
(
micro-intonation)
#
Prefix, or
onset
Onset may refer to:
*Onset (audio), the beginning of a musical note or sound
*Onset, Massachusetts
Onset is a census-designated place (CDP) in the town of Wareham, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 1,573 at the 2010 census.
Geog ...
of a sound, quite dissimilar to the ensuing lasting vibration
An example of a tonal sound is a musical sound that has a definite pitch, such as pressing a key on a piano; a sound with a noiselike character would be
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 ...
, the sound similar to that produced when a radio is not tuned to a station.
Erickson gives a table of subjective experiences and related physical phenomena based on Schouten's five attributes:
See also
Psychoacoustic evidence below.
Harmonics
![Harmonic spectra theoretical x y](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Harmonic_spectra_theoretical_x_y.png)
The richness of a sound or note a musical instrument produces is sometimes described in terms of a sum of a number of distinct
frequencies. The lowest frequency is called 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. I ...
'', and the pitch it produces is used to name the note, but the fundamental frequency is not always the dominant frequency. The dominant frequency is the frequency that is most heard, and it is always a multiple of the fundamental frequency. For example, the dominant frequency for the
transverse flute
A transverse flute or side-blown flute is a flute which is held horizontally when played. The player blows across the embouchure hole, in a direction perpendicular to the flute's body length.
Transverse flutes include the Western concert flut ...
is double the fundamental frequency. Other significant frequencies are called
overtone
An overtone is any resonant frequency above the fundamental frequency of a sound. (An overtone may or may not be a harmonic) In other words, overtones are all pitches higher than the lowest pitch within an individual sound; the fundamental i ...
s of the fundamental frequency, which may include
harmonics and
partials. Harmonics are
whole number multiples of the fundamental frequency, such as ×2, ×3, ×4, etc. Partials are other overtones. There are also sometimes
subharmonics at whole number ''divisions'' of the fundamental frequency. Most instruments produce harmonic sounds, but many instruments produce partials and
inharmonic
In music, inharmonicity is the degree to which the frequencies of overtones (also known as partials or partial tones) depart from whole multiples of the fundamental frequency ( harmonic series).
Acoustically, a note perceived to have a singl ...
tones, such as cymbals and other
indefinite-pitched instruments.
When the
tuning note in an
orchestra
An orchestra (; ) is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families.
There are typically four main sections of instruments:
* bowed string instruments, such as the violin, viola, c ...
or
concert band is played, the sound is a combination of 440 Hz, 880 Hz, 1320 Hz, 1760 Hz and so on. Each instrument in the orchestra or concert band produces a different combination of these frequencies, as well as harmonics and overtones. The sound waves of the different frequencies overlap and combine, and the balance of these amplitudes is a major factor in the characteristic sound of each instrument.
William Sethares
William A. Sethares (born April 19, 1955) is an American music theorist and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. In music, he has contributed to the theory of Dynamic Tonality and provided a formalization of conson ...
wrote that
just intonation and the western
equal tempered scale are related to the harmonic
spectra/timbre of many western instruments in an analogous way that the inharmonic timbre of the
Thai renat (a xylophone-like instrument) is related to the seven-tone near-equal tempered
pelog
Pelog ( su, ᮕᮦᮜᮧᮌ᮪, translit=Pélog /pelog/, jv, ꦥꦺꦭꦺꦴꦒ꧀, ban, ᬧᬾᬮᭀᬕ᭄, translit=Pélog /pelok/) is one of the essential tuning systems used in gamelan instruments that has heptatonic scale. The other ...
scale in which they are tuned. Similarly, the inharmonic spectra of
Balinese metallophones combined with harmonic instruments such as the stringed
rebab or the voice, are related to the five-note near-equal tempered
slendro
Slendro ( jv, ꦱ꧀ꦭꦺꦤ꧀ꦢꦿꦺꦴ, ban, slendro, translit=Sléndro) ( su, salendro, translit=Saléndro) is one of the essential tuning systems used in gamelan instruments that have pentatonic scale. Based on Javanese mythology, ...
scale commonly found in Indonesian
gamelan
Gamelan () ( jv, ꦒꦩꦼꦭꦤ꧀, su, ᮌᮙᮨᮜᮔ᮪, ban, ᬕᬫᭂᬮᬦ᭄) is the traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese peoples of Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. T ...
music.
Envelope
![C Envelope follower!](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/C_Envelope_follower%21.png)
The timbre of a sound is also greatly affected by the following aspects of its ''envelope'': attack time and characteristics, decay, sustain, release (
ADSR envelope) and
transients. Thus these are all common controls on professional
synthesizers. For instance, if one takes away the attack from the sound of a piano or trumpet, it becomes more difficult to identify the sound correctly, since the sound of the hammer hitting the strings or the first blast of the player's lips on the trumpet mouthpiece are highly characteristic of those instruments. The envelope is the overall amplitude structure of a sound.
In music history
Instrumental timbre played an increasing role in the practice of
orchestration during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Berlioz and
Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...
made significant contributions to its development during the nineteenth century. For example, Wagner's "Sleep motif" from Act 3 of his opera ''
Die Walküre
(; ''The Valkyrie''), WWV 86B, is the second of the four music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's ''Der Ring des Nibelungen'' (English: ''The Ring of the Nibelung''). It was performed, as a single opera, at the National Theatre Munich on ...
'', features a descending
chromatic scale
The chromatic scale (or twelve-tone scale) is a set of twelve pitches (more completely, pitch classes) used in tonal music, with notes separated by the interval of a semitone. Chromatic instruments, such as the piano, are made to produce th ...
that passes through a gamut of orchestral timbres. First the woodwind (flute, followed by oboe), then the massed sound of strings with the violins carrying the melody, and finally the brass (French horns).
Debussy
(Achille) Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the ...
, who composed during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, has been credited with elevating further the role of timbre: "To a marked degree the music of Debussy elevates timbre to an unprecedented structural status; already in ''
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
''Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune'' ( L. 86), known in English as ''Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun'', is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, approximately 10 minutes in duration. It was composed in 1894 and first performed ...
'' the ''color'' of
flute and
harp functions referentially".
Mahler
Gustav Mahler (; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism ...
’s approach to
orchestration illustrates the increasing role of differentiated timbres in music of the early twentieth century.
Norman Del Mar describes the following passage from the
Scherzo
A scherzo (, , ; plural scherzos or scherzi), in western classical music, is a short composition – sometimes a movement from a larger work such as a symphony or a sonata. The precise definition has varied over the years, but scherzo often re ...
movement of his
Sixth Symphony, as "a seven-bar link to the trio consisting of an extension in diminuendo of the repeated As… though now rising in a succession of piled octaves which moreover leap-frog with Cs added to the As. The lower octaves then drop away and only the Cs remain so as to dovetail with the first oboe phrase of the trio." During these bars, Mahler passes the repeated notes through a gamut of instrumental colors, mixed and single: starting with horns and pizzicato strings, progressing through trumpet, clarinet, flute, piccolo and finally, oboe: See also
Klangfarbenmelodie
''Klangfarbenmelodie'' (German for "sound-color melody") is a musical technique that involves splitting a musical line or melody between several instruments, rather than assigning it to just one instrument (or set of instruments), thereby adding c ...
.
In
rock music
Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as " rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles in the mid-1960s and later, particularly in the United States an ...
from the late 1960s to the 2000s, the timbre of specific sounds is important to a song. For example, in
heavy metal music, the sonic impact of the heavily amplified, heavily distorted
power chord
A power chord (also fifth chord) is a colloquial name for a chord in guitar music, especially electric guitar, that consists of the root note and the fifth, as well as possibly octaves of those notes. Power chords are commonly played on ...
played on electric guitar through very loud guitar amplifiers and rows of
speaker cabinets is an essential part of the style's musical identity.
Psychoacoustic evidence
Often, listeners can identify an instrument, even at different pitches and loudness, in different environments, and with different players. In the case of the
clarinet, acoustic analysis shows waveforms irregular enough to suggest three instruments rather than one. David Luce suggests that this implies that "
rtain strong regularities in the acoustic waveform of the above instruments must exist which are invariant with respect to the above variables". However, Robert Erickson argues that there are few regularities and they do not explain our "...powers of recognition and identification." He suggests borrowing the concept of
subjective constancy from studies of vision and
visual perception
Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding Biophysical environment, environment through photopic vision (daytime vision), color vision, scotopic vision (night vision), and mesopic vision (twilight vision), using light in the ...
.
Psychoacoustic experiments from the 1960s onwards tried to elucidate the nature of timbre. One method involves playing pairs of sounds to listeners, then using a
multidimensional scaling
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a means of visualizing the level of similarity of individual cases of a dataset. MDS is used to translate "information about the pairwise 'distances' among a set of n objects or individuals" into a configurati ...
algorithm to aggregate their dissimilarity judgments into a timbre space. The most consistent outcomes from such experiments are that
brightness
Brightness is an attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to be radiating or reflecting light. In other words, brightness is the perception elicited by the luminance of a visual target. The perception is not linear to luminan ...
or spectral energy distribution, and the ''bite'', or rate and synchronicity and rise time, of the attack are important factors.
Tristimulus timbre model
The concept of
tristimulus originates in the world of color, describing the way three primary colors can be mixed together to create a given color. By analogy, the musical tristimulus measures the mixture of
harmonics in a given sound, grouped into three sections. It is basically a proposal of reducing a huge number of sound partials, that can amount to dozens or hundreds in some cases, down to only three values. The first tristimulus measures the relative weight of the first harmonic; the second tristimulus measures the relative weight of the second, third, and fourth harmonics taken together; and the third tristimulus measures the relative weight of all the remaining harmonics.
:
However, more evidence, studies and applications would be needed regarding this type of representation, in order to validate it.
Brightness
The term "brightness" is also used in discussions of sound timbres, in a rough analogy with
visual brightness. Timbre researchers consider brightness to be one of the perceptually strongest distinctions between sounds, and formalize it acoustically as an indication of the amount of high-frequency content in a sound, using a measure such as the
spectral centroid.
See also
*
Formant
In speech science and phonetics, a formant is the broad spectral maximum that results from an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract. In acoustics, a formant is usually defined as a broad peak, or local maximum, in the spectrum. For harmoni ...
Footnotes
References
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{{Authority control
Opera terminology
Sound
Acoustics