Timbre
In music, timbre (/ˈtæmbər, ˈtɪm-, ˈtæ̃-/), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, 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 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.[citation needed]
The physical characteristics of sound that determine the perception of timbre include frequency
Synonyms
Tone quality and tone color are synonyms for timbre, as well as the "texture attributed to a single instrument". However, the word
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, 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".[3]
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 finds, "scaled to the concerns of much contemporary music":[4]
- Range between tonal and noiselike character
- Spectral envelope
- Time envelopein terms of rise, duration, and decay (ADSR, which stands for "attack, decay, sustain, release")
- Changes both of micro-intonation)
- Prefix, or 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; a sound with a noiselike character would be white noise, 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:[5]
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 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
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 near-equal tempered slendro scale commonly found in Indonesian gamelan music.[6]
Envelope
The timbre of a sound is also greatly affected by the following aspects of its envelope: attack time and characteristics, decay, sustain, release (
In music history
Instrumental timbre played an increasing role in the practice of
See also Klangfarbenmelodie
In
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".[11] 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.[12]
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,[13] and the bite, or rate and synchronicity[14] and rise time,[15] of the attack are important factors.
Tristimulus timbre model
The concept of
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
See also
Footnotes
- ^ Erickson 1975, p. 7.
- ^ Abbado, Adriano (1988). "Perceptual Correspondences: Animation and Sound". MS Thesis. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. 3.
- ^ Acoustical Society of America Standards Secretariat (1994). "Acoustical Terminology ANSI S1.1–1994 (ASA 111-1994)". American National Standard. ANSI / Acoustical Society of America.
- ^ Erickson 1975, p. 5.
- ^ Erickson 1975, p. 6.
- ISBN 3-540-76173-X.
- ISBN 9780563084556.
- ^ Latham, Peter. (1926) "Wagner: Aesthetics and Orchestration". Gramophone (June): [page needed].
- ISBN 0-393-02193-9.
- ^ Del Mar, Norman (1980). Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study. London: Eulenburg.
- ^ Luce, David A. (1963). "Physical Correlates of Nonpercussive Musical Instrument Tones", Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- ^ Erickson 1975, p. 11.
- PMID 560400.
- ^ a b Wessel, David (1979). "Low Dimensional Control of Musical Timbre". Computer Music Journal 3:45–52. Rewritten version, 1999, as "Timbre Space as a Musical Control Structure".
- S2CID 44778763.
- ^ Peeters, G. (2003) “A Large Set of Audio Features or Sound Description (Similarity and Classification) in the CUIDADO Project”.[full citation needed]
- ^ Pollard, H. F., and E. V. Jansson (1982) A Tristimulus Method for the Specification of Musical Timbre. Acustica 51:162–71.
References
- American Standards Association (1960). American Standard 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". In Foundations of Modern Auditory Theory vol. 1, edited by Jerry V. Tobias, [ISBN 0-12-691901-1.
- ISBN 0-520-02376-5.
- McAdams, Stephen, and Albert Bregman (1979). "Hearing Musical Streams". Computer Music Journal 3, no. 4 (December): 26–43, 60.
- 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]35–44, 90. Tokyo: Maruzen; Amsterdam: Elsevier.