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In music, timbre (pronounced /ˈtam-bər'/, tɪm. Music is an Art form in which the medium is Sound organized in Time. bər like timber, or ˈtæm(brə),[1] from Fr. timbre tɛ̃bʁ) is the quality of a musical note or sound that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices or musical instruments. In Music, the term note has two primary meanings 1 a sign used in Musical notation to represent the relative duration and pitch of a Sound; A musical instrument is a device constructed or modified for the purpose of making Music. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. Timbre is also known in psychoacoustics as sound quality or sound color. Psychoacoustics is the study of subjective human Perception of Sounds Alternatively it can be described as the study of the Psychological correlates

For example, timbre is what, with a little practice, people use to distinguish the saxophone from the trumpet in a jazz group, even if both instruments are playing notes at the same pitch and amplitude. The saxophone (commonly referred to simply as sax) is a conical- bored transposing Musical instrument considered a member of the Woodwind Jazz is an American Musical art form which originated in the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States Pitch represents the perceived Fundamental frequency of a sound Amplitude is the magnitude of change in the oscillating variable with each Oscillation, within an oscillating system Timbre has been called "a wastebasket category",[2] or "the psychoacoustician's multidimensional wastebasket category"[3] as it can denote many apparently unrelated aspects of a sound.

Contents

History

The Chinese developed a sophisticated understanding of the musical quality of timbre during the Song Dynasty. The Song Dynasty ( Wade-Giles: Sung Ch'ao was a ruling dynasty in China between 960&ndash1279 CE it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms They discovered that the timbre of string instruments could be changed depending on how the strings were touched. Strings could be plucked, brushed, hit, scraped, or rubbed to produce different sounds. The Chinese composed music on the Qin, a long, wooden board with strings. The (simplified/traditional 古琴; Pinyin: gǔqín Their Qin songs emphasized the timbre, and the changes in sound could be heard throughout the musical piece.

Synonyms

Tone quality is used as a synonym for timbre.

Tone color is also often used as a synonym. People who experience synesthesia may see certain colors when they hear particular instruments. Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae)—from the Ancient Greek (syn meaning "with" Helmholtz used the German Klangfarbe (tone color), and 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, p. Alexander John Ellis ( 14 June, 1814 - 28 October, 1890) was an English mathematician and philologist. 7).

Colors of the optical spectrum are not generally explicitly associated with particular sounds. Rather, the sound of an instrument may be described with words like "warm" or "harsh" or other terms, perhaps suggesting that tone color has more in common with the sense of touch than of sight. However, color is often used to describe different types of noise such as pink or white. Noise color is determined by mixing together parts of the visible light spectrum that correspond to the audible sound spectrum. Even though Noise is a random Signal, it can have characteristic statistical properties A 20 hertz tone is subsonic and a 20000 hertz tone is ultrasonic, so pink noise is pink because it contains loud low-frequency noise mixed with quieter broadband noise.

American Standards Association definition

The American Standards Association defines timbre as "[. . . ] that attribute of sensation in terms of which a listener can judge that two sounds having the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar". Loudness is the quality of a Sound that is the primary psychological correlate of physical strength (amplitude Pitch represents the perceived Fundamental frequency of a sound A note to the 1960 definition (p. 45) adds that "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. "

Attributes

J. F. Schouten (1968, p. 42) describes the "elusive attributes of timbre" as "determined by at least five major acoustic parameters" which Robert Erickson (1975) finds "scaled to the concerns of much contemporary music":

  1. The range between tonal and noiselike character. Robert Erickson ( March 7, 1917 in Marquette Michigan &ndash April 24, 1997 in San Diego California) was an American composer
  2. The spectral envelope.
  3. The time envelope in terms of rise, duration, and decay.
  4. The changes both of spectral envelope (formant-glide) and fundamental frequency (micro-intonation).
  5. The prefix, an onset of a sound quite dissimilar to the ensuing lasting vibration.

Spectra

The richness of a sound or note produced by a musical instrument is sometimes described in terms of a sum of a number of distinct frequencies. Frequency is a measure of the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit Time. The lowest frequency is called the fundamental frequency and the pitch it produces is used to name the note. The fundamental tone, often referred to simply as the fundamental and abbreviated fo, is the lowest frequency in a harmonic series. Pitch represents the perceived Fundamental frequency of a sound For example, in western music, instruments are normally tuned to A = 440 Hz. Other significant frequencies are called overtones of the fundamental frequency, which may include harmonics and partials. An overtone is a natural resonance or vibration frequency of a system In Acoustics and Telecommunication, the harmonic of a Wave is a component Frequency of the signal that is an Integer Harmonics are whole number multiples of the fundamental frequency — ×2, ×3, ×4, etc. Partials are other overtones. Most western instruments produce harmonic sounds, but many instruments produce partials and inharmonic tones, such as cymbals and other non-pitched instruments. In music inharmonicity is the degree to which the frequencies of Overtones (known as partials partial tones or Harmonics depart from whole

When the orchestral tuning note is played, the sound is a combination of 440 Hz, 880 Hz, 1320 Hz, 1760 Hz and so on. The balance of the amplitudes of the different frequencies is responsible for the characteristic sound of each instrument.

The fundamental is not necessarily the strongest component of the overall sound. But it is implied by the existence of the harmonic series — the A above would be distinguishable from the one an octave below (220 Hz, 440 Hz, 660 Hz, 880 Hz) by the presence of the third harmonic, even if the fundamental were indistinct. In Music, an octave ( is the the use of which is "common in most musical systems Similarly, a pitch is often inferred from non-harmonic spectra, supposedly through a mapping process, an attempt to find the closest harmonic fit.

It is possible to add artificial 'subharmonics' to the sound using electronic effects but, again, this does not affect the naming of the note.

William Sethares (2004) wrote that just intonation and the western equal tempered scale derive from the harmonic spectra/timbre of most western instruments. In music just intonation is any Musical tuning in which the frequencies of Notes are related by Ratios of Whole numbers Any interval Equal temperament is a Musical temperament, or a system of tuning in which every pair of adjacent notes has an identical Frequency ratio. In Music, a scale is a group of musical notes collected in ascending and descending order that provides material for or is used to conveniently represent part or all A spectrum (plural spectra or spectrums) is a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary infinitely within a continuum. Similarly the specific inharmonic timbre of Thai metallophones would produce the seven-tone near-equal temperament they do indeed employ. Thailand music reflects it geographic position at the intersection of China India Indonesia and Cambodia and reflects trade routes that have historically included Persia Africa Greece A metallophone is any Musical instrument consisting of tuned Metal bars which are struck to make sound usually with a mallet. The five-note sometimes near-equal tempered slendro scale provides the most consonance in the combination of the inharmonic spectra of Balinese metallophones with harmonic instruments such as the stringed rebab. Slendro (called salendro by the Sundanese) is a Pentatonic scale, one of the two most common scales ( laras) used in Indonesian Bali is an Indonesian Island located at, the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to The rebab ( Arabic الرباب or رباب; also rebap, rabab, rebeb,

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. ADSR envelope is a component of many Synthesizers samplers and other Electronic musical instruments. In Acoustics and Audio, a transient is a short-duration Signal that represents a non-harmonic attack phase of a musical sound or spoken word Thus these are all common controls on 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 blat 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 "fits" inside its envelope: what this means should be clear from a time-domain display of almost any interesting sound, zoomed out enough that the entire waveform is visible.

In music

Timbre is often cited as one of the fundamental aspects of music. Music is an Art form in which the medium is Sound organized in Time. Formally, timbre and other factors are usually secondary to pitch. "To a marked degree the music of Debussy elevates timbre to an unprecedented structural status; already in L'Apres-midi d'un Faune the color of flute and harp functions referentially," according to Jim Samson (1977). Surpassing Debussy is Klangfarbenmelodie and surpassing that the use of sound masses. Klangfarbenmelodie ( German for tone-color-melody is a Musical technique that involves breaking up a musical line or Melody out from one In contrast to more traditional musical textures, sound mass composition "minimizes the importance of individual pitches in preference for texture

Erickson (ibid, p. 6) gives a table of subjective experiences and related physical phenomena based on Schouten's five attributes:

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

Often listeners are able to identify the kind of instrument even across "conditions of changing pitch and loudness, in different environments and with different players. Rustle noise is Noise consisting of Aperiodic pulses characterized by the average time between those pulses (such as the mean time interval between clicks " In the case of the clarinet, an acoustic analysis of the waveforms shows they are irregular enough to suggest three instruments rather than one. David Luce (1963, p. 17) suggests that this implies "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 the borrowing from studies of vision and visual perception the concept of subjective constancy. (Erickson 1975, p. 11)

Spelling

Though timber is accepted, the more common spelling is timbre to distinguish the word from timber ("wood"). Lumber or timber is Wood in any of its stages from felling through readiness for use as structural Material for Construction, or

See also

Further reading

References

  1. ^ "Timbre", Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (online edition)
  2. ^ W. Dixon Ward (1970). "Musical Perception", in Jerry V. Tobias: Foundations of Modern Auditory Theory 1. Academic Press, 409.  
  3. ^ McAdams and Bregman 1979

Sources

Dictionary

timbre

-noun

  1. The quality of a sound independent of its pitch and volume.
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