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Timbre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Timbre
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In music, timbre (/tmbr/ TAM-br or


/tmbr/ TIM-br) also known as tone color
or tone quality from psychoacoustics, is the
quality of a musical note, sound, or tone that
distinguishes different types of sound
production, such as voices and musical
instruments, string instruments, wind
instruments, and percussion instruments. The
physical characteristics of sound that
determine the perception of timbre include
spectrum and envelope.

Spectrogram of the first


second of an E9 chord
played on a Fender
Stratocaster guitar with
noiseless pickups. Below
is the E9 chord audio:

In simple terms, timbre is what makes a


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particular musical sound different from
another, even when they have the same pitch
and loudness. For instance, it is the difference between a guitar and a
piano playing the same note at the same loudness. 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 pitch and loudness.

Contents
1 Synonyms
2 American Standards Association definition
3 Attributes
3.1 Harmonics
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Timbre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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3.2 Envelope
4 Timbre in music history
5 Psychoacoustic evidence
6 Tristimulus timbre model
7 See also
8 References

Synonyms
Tone quality and color are synonyms for timbre, as well as the "texture
attributed to a single instrument". 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
Ellis, who also discredits register and color for their pre-existing English
meanings (Erickson 1975, 7).
The sound of a musical instrument may be described with such words as
bright, dark, warm, harsh, and other terms. There are also colors of noise,
such as pink and white.
In visual representations of sound, timbre corresponds to the shape of the
image (Abbado 1988, 3).

American Standards Association definition


The American Standards Association definition 12.9 of timbre describes it
as "that attribute of sensation in terms of which a listener can judge that
two sounds having the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar", adding,
"Timbre depends primarily upon the spectrum of the stimulus, but it also
depends upon the waveform, the sound pressure, the frequency location of
the spectrum, and the temporal characteristics of the stimulus" (American
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the spectrum, and the temporal characteristics of the stimulus" (American


Standards Association 1960, 45).

Attributes
Timbre has been called, "...the psychoacoustician's multidimensional
waste-basket category for everything that cannot be labeled pitch or
loudness." (McAdams and Bregman 1979, 34; cf. Dixon Ward 1965, 55
and Tobias 1970, 409).
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 (1975, 5) finds, "scaled to the
concerns of much contemporary music":
1. The range between tonal and noiselike character
2. The spectral envelope
3. The time envelope in terms of rise, duration, and decay (ADSR
attack, decay, sustain, release)
4. The changes both of spectral envelope (formant-glide) and
fundamental frequency (micro-intonation)
5. The prefix, or onset of a sound, quite dissimilar to the ensuing lasting
vibration
Erickson (1975, 6) gives a table of subjective experiences and related
physical phenomena based on Schouten's five attributes:
Subjective
Tonal character, usually
pitched
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Objective
Periodic sound
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Timbre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Noisy, with or without some


tonal character, including
rustle noise
Coloration
Beginning/ending
Coloration glide or formant
glide
Microintonation
Vibrato
Tremolo
Attack
Final sound

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Noise, including random pulses


characterized by the rustle time (the mean
interval between pulses)
Spectral envelope
Physical rise and decay time
Change of spectral envelope
Small change (one up and down) in
frequency
Frequency modulation
Amplitude modulation
Prefix
Suffix

See also "Psychoacoustic evidence" below.

Harmonics
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, and the pitch it
produces is used to name the note, but the
Harmonic spectra.
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 overtones 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
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divisions of the fundamental frequency. Most instruments produce


harmonic sounds, but many instruments produce partials and inharmonic
tones, such as cymbals and other indefinite-pitched instruments.
When the tuning note in an orchestra 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 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 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 nearequal tempered slendro scale commonly found in Indonesian gamelan
music (Sethares 1998, 6, 211, 318).

Envelope
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 synthesizers.
A signal and its envelope
For instance, if one takes away the attack from
marked with red
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 are highly characteristic of those instruments. The envelope is
the overall amplitude structure of a sound, so called because the sound just
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the overall amplitude structure of a sound, so called because the sound just
"fits" inside its envelope: what this means should be clear from a timedomain display of almost any interesting sound, zoomed out enough that
the entire waveform is visible.

Timbre in music history


The music of Debussy, composed during the last decades of the nineteenth
and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, has been credited with
elevating the role of timbre in music: "To a marked degree the music of
Debussy elevates timbre to an unprecedented structural status; already in
Prlude l'aprs-midi d'un faune the color of flute and harp functions
referentially" (Samson 1977,).

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 (1963, 16) suggests
that this implies that, "Certain 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 (Erickson 1975, 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 or spectral energy distribution
(Grey 1977), and the bite, or rate and synchronicity (Wessel 1979) and
rise time (Lakatos 2000), of the attack are important factors.
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rise time (Lakatos 2000), 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. 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 (Peeters 2003; Pollard and Jansson 1982,):

See also
Formant

References
Abbado, Adriano (1988). "Perceptual Correspondences: Animation
and Sound". MS Thesis. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
American Standards Association (1960). American Standard
Acoustical Terminology. New York: American Standards Association.

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Acoustical Terminology. New York: American Standards Association.


Dixon Ward, W. (1965). "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.
Dixon Ward, W. (1970) "Musical Perception
(http://books.google.com/books?
id=XNVsAAAAMAAJ&q=timbre+wastebasket&dq=timbre+wastebas
ket&lr=&as_brr=0&ei=GdzvSMWaMYPWsgObmIWYBw&pgis=1)".
In Foundations of Modern Auditory Theory vol. 1, edited by Jerry V.
Tobias,. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-691901-1.
Erickson, Robert (1975). Sound Structure in Music
(https://books.google.com/books?id=t3j6_ShXeWYC). Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02376-5.
Grey, John M. (1977). "Multidimensional Perceptual Scaling of
Musical Timbres". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
61(5):127077. doi:10.1121/1.381428
(https://dx.doi.org/10.1121%2F1.381428)
Lakatos, S. (2000). "A Common Perceptual Space for Harmonic and
Percussive Timbres". Perception & Psychophysics 62(7):142639.
PMID 11143454.
Luce, David A. (1963). "Physical Correlates of Nonpercussive
Musical Instrument Tones", Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
McAdams, Stephen, and Albert Bregman (1979). "Hearing Musical
Streams". Computer Music Journal 3, no. 4 (December): 2643, 60.
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Streams". Computer Music Journal 3, no. 4 (December): 2643, 60.


Peeters, G. (2003) A Large Set of Audio Features or Sound
Description (Similarity and Classification) in the CUIDADO Project
(http://www.ircam.fr/anasyn/peeters/ARTICLES/Peeters_2003_cuidad
oaudiofeatures.pdf).
Pollard, H. F., and E. V. Jansson (1982) A Tristimulus Method for the
Specification of Musical Timbre. Acustica 51:16271.
Samson, Jim (1977). Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion
and Atonality, 1900-1920. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
ISBN 0-393-02193-9.
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,3544, 90. Tokyo: Maruzen; Amsterdam:
Elsevier.
Sethares, William (1998). Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale
(http://books.google.com/books?
id=KChoKKhjOb0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_summary_r).
Berlin, London, and New York: Springer
(http://www.springer.com/978-1-85233-797-1). ISBN 3-540-76173X.
Wessel, David (1979). "Low Dimensional Control of Musical
Timbre". Computer Music Journal 3:4552. Rewritten version, 1999,
as "Timbre Space as a Musical Control Structure
(http://mediatheque.ircam.fr/articles/textes/Wessel78a/)".

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