View source for Timbre

{{short description|Quality of a musical note or sound or tone}}
{{Other uses}}
{{Distinguish|Timber}}
{{Use shortened footnotes|date=April 2021}}
[[File:9577 Guitarz1970 Clean E9 Guitar Chord (Mike Tribulas).jpg|thumb|right|[[Spectrogram]] of the first second of an E9 [[suspended chord]] played on a [[Fender Stratocaster]] guitar. Below is the E9 suspended chord audio:{{brk}}
[[File:9577 Guitarz1970 Clean E9 Guitar Chord (Mike Tribulas).ogg]] ]]

In music, '''timbre''' ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|t|æ|m|b|ər|,_|ˈ|t|ɪ|m|-|,_|ˈ|t|æ̃|-}}), also known as '''tone color''' or '''tone quality''' (from [[psychoacoustics]]), is the perceived sound of a [[musical note]], sound or [[musical tone|tone]]. Timbre distinguishes sounds according to their source, such as choir voices and musical instruments. It also enables listeners to distinguish instruments in the same category (e.g., an [[oboe]] and a [[clarinet]], both [[Woodwind instrument|woodwinds]]).

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 distinctive with its own unique tone color. Musicians distinguish instruments based on their varied timbres, even instruments playing notes at the same [[Pitch (music)|pitch]] and volume.{{cn|date=April 2024}}

The physical characteristics that govern timbre include [[frequency spectrum]] and [[envelope (music)|envelope]]. 

Musicians can change timbre by modifying their singing/playing techniques. For example, a violinist can use different bowing styles or bow on different parts of the string. E.g., playing ''[[sul tasto]]'' produces a light, airy timbre, whereas ''[[sul ponticello]]'' produces a harsh, even, and aggressive timbre. On electric guitar and electric piano, performers can change timbre using [[effects unit]]s and [[graphic equalizer]]s.

==Synonyms==
''Tone quality'' and ''tone color'' are synonyms for ''timbre'', as well as the "''texture'' attributed to a single instrument". However, the word [[musical texture|texture]] can also refer to the [[arrangement]]/composition, such as [[polyphony|multiple, interweaving melody lines]] versus [[homophony|a singable melody accompanied by subordinate chords]]. [[Hermann von Helmholtz]] used the German ''Klangfarbe'' (''tone color''), and [[John Tyndall]] proposed an English translation, ''clangtint'', but both terms were disapproved of by [[Alexander John Ellis|Alexander Ellis]], who also discredits ''register'' and ''color'' for their pre-existing English meanings.{{sfn|Erickson|1975|p=7}} 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]], such as [[Pink noise|pink]] and [[White noise|white]]. In visual representations of sound, timbre corresponds to the shape of the image,{{r|Abbado1988_3}} while loudness corresponds to brightness; pitch corresponds to the y-shift of the spectrogram.

==ASA definition==
The [[Acoustical Society of America]] (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 (music)|pitch]], are dissimilar", adding, "Timbre depends primarily upon the [[Spectral density|frequency spectrum]], although it also depends upon the sound pressure and the temporal characteristics of the sound".{{r|ASASS1994}}

==Attributes==
Many commentators have decomposed timbre into component attributes. For example, Schouten described the "elusive attributes of timbre" as "determined by at least five major acoustic parameters", which [[Robert Erickson]] found encompassed much contemporary music:{{sfn|Erickson|1975|p=5}}

* Range between [[tonality|tonal]] and noiselike character
* [[Spectral envelope]]
* [[ADSR envelope|Time envelope]] in terms of rise, duration, and decay (ADSR, which stands for "attack, decay, sustain, release")
* Changes both of [[spectral envelope]] (formant-glide) and [[fundamental frequency]] ([[Microtonal music|micro-intonation]])
* [[prefix (acoustics)|Prefix]], or [[Onset (audio)|onset]] 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; one sound with a noiselike character is [[white noise]].

Erickson offered a table of subjective experiences and related physical phenomena based on the attributes:{{sfn|Erickson|1975|p=6}}

:{| class="wikitable"
| '''''Subjective'''''
| '''''Objective'''''
|-
| Tonal character, usually pitched
| Periodic sound
|-
| Noisy, with or without some tonal character, including [[rustle noise]]
| Noise, including random pulses characterized by the rustle time (the mean interval between pulses)
|-
| Coloration
| Spectral envelope
|-
| Beginning/ending
| Physical rise and decay time
|-
| Coloration glide or formant glide
| Change of spectral envelope
|-
| Microintonation
| Small change (one up and down) in frequency
|-
| [[Vibrato]]
| Frequency modulation
|-
| [[Tremolo]]
| Amplitude modulation
|-
| Attack
| Prefix
|-
| Final sound
| Suffix
|}

See also [[#Psychoacoustic evidence|Psychoacoustic evidence]] below.

===Harmonics===
{{Details|Fourier transform}}
[[File:Harmonic spectra theoretical x y.png|thumb|[[Harmonic spectrum]]]]

The richness of a sound or note a musical instrument produces is sometimes described in terms of a sum of a number of distinct [[frequency|frequencies]]. The lowest frequency is called the ''[[fundamental frequency]]'', 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]] is double the fundamental frequency. Other significant frequencies are called [[overtone]]s of the fundamental frequency, which may include [[harmonic]]s and [[Harmonic series (music)#Partial|partials]]. Harmonics are [[Natural number|whole number]] multiples of the fundamental frequency, such as ×2, ×3, ×4, etc. Partials are other overtones. There are also sometimes [[subharmonic]]s at whole number ''divisions'' of the fundamental frequency. Most instruments produce harmonic sounds, but many instruments produce partials and [[inharmonic]] tones, such as cymbals and other [[Percussion instrument#Indefinite pitch|indefinite-pitched]] instruments.

When the [[A440 (pitch standard)|tuning note]] in an [[orchestra]] or [[concert band]] is played, the sound is a combination of 440&nbsp;Hz, 880&nbsp;Hz, 1320&nbsp;Hz, 1760&nbsp;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]] wrote that [[just intonation]] and the western [[Equal temperament|equal tempered]] [[Scale (music)|scale]] are related to the harmonic [[spectrum|spectra]]/timbre of many western instruments in an analogous way that the inharmonic timbre of the [[Music of Thailand|Thai]] renat (a xylophone-like instrument) is related to the seven-tone near-equal tempered [[pelog]] scale in which they are tuned. Similarly, the inharmonic spectra of [[Bali]]nese metallophones combined with harmonic instruments such as the stringed [[rebab]] or the voice, are related to the five-note near-equal tempered [[slendro]] scale commonly found in Indonesian [[gamelan]] music.{{r|Sethares1998_6211318}}

===Envelope===
[[File:C Envelope follower!.png|thumb|A signal and its envelope marked with red]]
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 [[Transient (acoustics)|transient]]s. Thus these are all common controls on professional [[synthesizer]]s. 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. [[Hector Berlioz|Berlioz]]{{r|Macdonald1969_51}} and [[Richard Wagner|Wagner]]{{r|Latham1926}} made significant contributions to its development during the nineteenth century. For example, Wagner's "Sleep motif" from Act 3 of his opera ''[[Die Walküre]]'', features a descending [[chromatic scale]] 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).[[File:Wagner Sleep music from Act 3 of Die Walkure.wav|thumb|Wagner Sleep music from Act 3 of ''Die Walküre'']][[File:Wagner Sleep music from Act 4 of Die Walkure.png|thumb|center|600px|Wagner Sleep music from Act 3 of ''Die Walküre'']][[Claude Debussy|Debussy]], 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]]'' the ''color'' of [[flute]] and [[harp]] functions referentially".{{r|Samson1977_195}} [[Mahler]]'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]] movement of his [[Symphony No. 6 (Mahler)|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.{{r|DelMar1980_48}} 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:[[File:Mahler, Symphony No. 6, Scherzo, Figure 55, bars 5-12.wav|thumb|Mahler, Symphony No. 6, Scherzo, Figure 55, bars 5–12]][[File:Mahler, Symphony No. 6, Scherzo, Figure 55, bars 5-12.png|thumb|center|500px|Mahler, Symphony No. 6, Scherzo, Figure 55, bars 5–12]] (See also {{em|[[Klangfarbenmelodie]]}}.)

In [[rock music]] 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]] played on electric guitar through very loud guitar amplifiers and rows of [[speaker enclosures|speaker cabinet]]s 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
: "[C]ertain strong regularities in the acoustic waveform of the above instruments must exist which are invariant with respect to the above variables".{{r|Luce1963_16}}

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]].{{sfn|Erickson|1975|p=11}}

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]] algorithm to aggregate their dissimilarity judgments into a timbre space. The most consistent outcomes from such experiments are that [[#Brightness|brightness]] or spectral energy distribution,{{r|Grey1977}} and the ''bite'', or rate and synchronicity{{r|Wessel1979}} and rise time,{{r|Lakatos2000}} of the attack are important factors.

==Tristimulus timbre model==<!--merged from [[Tristimulus timbre model]] per b[[WP:Articles for deletion/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 [[harmonic]]s in a given sound, grouped into three sections. It is basically a proposal of reducing a huge number of sound partials, which 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:{{r|Peeters2003|PollardJansson1982}}{{Page needed|date=December 2013}}
: <math>
 T_1 = \frac{a_1}{\sum_{h=1}^H a_h}, \quad
 T_2 = \frac{a_2 + a_3 + a_4}{\sum_{h=1}^H a_h}, \quad
 T_3 = \frac{\sum_{h=5}^{H}{a_h}}{\sum_{h=1}^H a_h}.
</math>
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{{r|Wessel1979}} 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==
{{Portal|Music}}
* [[Formant]]

==Footnotes==
{{Reflist|refs=
<ref name=Abbado1988_3>Abbado, Adriano (1988). "Perceptual Correspondences: Animation and Sound". MS Thesis. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. 3.</ref>

<ref name=ASASS1994>Acoustical Society of America Standards Secretariat (1994). "Acoustical Terminology ANSI S1.1–1994 (ASA 111-1994)". American National Standard. ANSI / Acoustical Society of America.</ref>

<ref name=Sethares1998_6211318>Sethares, William (1998). ''Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale'']. Berlin, London, and New York: [[Springer Publishing|Springer]]. pp. [https://books.google.com/books?id=KChoKKhjOb0C&pg=PA6 6], [https://books.google.com/books?id=KChoKKhjOb0C&pg=PA211 211], [https://books.google.com/books?id=KChoKKhjOb0C&pg=PA318 318]. {{ISBN|3-540-76173-X}}.</ref>

<ref name=Macdonald1969_51>Macdonald, Hugh. (1969). ''Berlioz Orchestral Music''. BBC Music Guides. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. p. 51. {{ISBN|9780563084556}}.</ref>

<ref name=Latham1926>Latham, Peter. (1926) "Wagner: Aesthetics and Orchestration". ''Gramophone'' (June): {{Page needed|date=April 2017}}.</ref>

<ref name=Samson1977_195>{{cite book |last=Samson |first=Jim |date=1977 |title=Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900–1920 |place=New York City |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |isbn=0-393-02193-9}}</ref>

<ref name=DelMar1980_48>Del Mar, Norman (1980). ''Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study''. London: Eulenburg.</ref>

<ref name=Luce1963_16>Luce, David A. (1963). "Physical Correlates of Nonpercussive Musical Instrument Tones", Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.</ref>

<ref name=Grey1977>{{cite journal | last=Grey | first=John M. | title=Multidimensional perceptual scaling of musical timbres | journal=The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America | publisher=Acoustical Society of America (ASA) | volume=61 | issue=5 | year=1977 | issn=0001-4966 | doi=10.1121/1.381428 | pages=1270–1277| pmid=560400 | bibcode=1977ASAJ...61.1270G }}</ref>

<ref name=Wessel1979>Wessel, David (1979). "Low Dimensional Control of Musical Timbre". ''Computer Music Journal'' 3:45–52. Rewritten version, 1999, as "[http://mediatheque.ircam.fr/articles/textes/Wessel78a/ Timbre Space as a Musical Control Structure]".</ref>

<ref name=Lakatos2000>{{cite journal | last=Lakatos | first=Stephen | title=A common perceptual space for harmonic and percussive timbres | journal=Perception & Psychophysics | publisher=Springer Science and Business Media LLC | volume=62 | issue=7 | year=2000 | issn=0031-5117 | doi=10.3758/bf03212144 | pages=1426–1439|pmid=11143454| s2cid=44778763 | doi-access=free }}</ref>

<ref name=Peeters2003>Peeters, G. (2003) “[http://recherche.ircam.fr/anasyn/peeters/ARTICLES/Peeters_2003_cuidadoaudiofeatures.pdf A Large Set of Audio Features or Sound Description (Similarity and Classification) in the CUIDADO Project]”.{{Full citation needed|date=December 2013}}</ref>

<ref name=PollardJansson1982>Pollard, H. F., and E. V. Jansson (1982) ''A Tristimulus Method for the Specification of Musical Timbre''. ''Acustica'' 51:162–71.</ref>
}}

==References==
* {{cite book|last=American Standards Association|date=1960|title=American Standard Acoustical Terminology|place=New York|publisher=American Standards Association}}
* {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Dixon Ward|1965}}|reference=Dixon Ward, W. (1965). "[https://books.google.com/books?id=XNVsAAAAMAAJ&q=timbre+wastebasket Psychoacoustics]". In ''Audiometry: Principles and Practices'', edited by Aram Glorig, 55. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co. Reprinted, Huntington, N.Y.: R. E. Krieger Pub. Co., 1977. {{ISBN|0-88275-604-4}}.}}
* {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Dixon Ward|1970}}|reference=Dixon Ward, W. (1970) "Musical Perception". In ''Foundations of Modern Auditory Theory'' vol. 1, edited by Jerry V. Tobias, {{Page needed|date=May 2010}}<!--Inclusive page numbers of the article needed.-->. New York: Academic Press. {{ISBN|0-12-691901-1}}.}}
* {{cite book |last=Erickson |first=Robert |author-link=Robert Erickson |date=1975 |title=Sound Structure in Music |location=Berkeley and Los Angeles |publisher=University of California Press| isbn=0-520-02376-5 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=t3j6_ShXeWYC
}}
* {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|McAdams and Bregman|1979}}|reference=McAdams, Stephen, and Albert Bregman (1979). "Hearing Musical Streams". ''Computer Music Journal'' 3, no. 4 (December): 26–43, 60.}}
* {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Schouten|1968}}|reference=Schouten, J. F. (1968). "The Perception of Timbre". In ''Reports of the 6th International Congress on Acoustics, Tokyo, GP-6-2'', 6 vols., edited by Y. Kohasi, {{Full citation needed|date=May 2010}}<!--Volume number needed.-->35–44, 90. Tokyo: Maruzen; Amsterdam: Elsevier.}}

==External links==

* John Grey, 1975. [https://ccrma.stanford.edu/files/papers/stanm2.pdf An Exploration of Musical Timbre] (Ph.D. Thesis)

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