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