Timbre

In music, timbre (French, IPA /'tæmb?r/ as in the first two syllables of tambourine) is the quality of a musical note or sound which distinguishes different types of sound production or musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound which are used in the determination of timbre are spectrum and envelope with psychoacoustics or human perception also determining the perceived quality of a sound. Timbre is what, with a little practice, people use to pick out the saxophone from the trumpet in a jazz group or the flute from the violin in an orchestra, even if they are playing notes at the same pitch and amplitude (or notes which are otherwise equal). Timbre has been called the psychoacoustician's waste-basket as it can include so many factors.

In music

Timbre is often cited as one of the fundamental aspects of music. 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.

Related Topics:
Music - Klangfarbenmelodie - Sound mass

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

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Often listeners are able to identify the timbre of an instrument, for instance a clarinet, even across "conditions of changing pitch and loudness, in different environments and with different players." 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)

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