Timbre

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.

[1] Determined by its frequency composition, the sound of a musical instrument may be described with words such as bright, dark, warm, harsh, and other terms.

Erickson gives a table of subjective experiences and related physical phenomena based on Schouten's five attributes:[5] See also Psychoacoustic evidence below.

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.

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.

For example, Wagner's "Sleep motif" from Act 3 of his opera Die Walküre, features a descending chromatic scale that passes through a gamut of orchestral timbres.

First the woodwind (flute, followed by oboe), then the massed sound of strings with the violins carrying the melody, and finally the brass (French horns).Debussy, who composed during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, has been credited with elevating further the role of timbre: "To a marked degree the music of Debussy elevates timbre to an unprecedented structural status; already in Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune the color of flute and harp functions referentially".

[9] Mahler's approach to orchestration illustrates the increasing role of differentiated timbres in music of the early twentieth century.

During these bars, Mahler passes the repeated notes through a gamut of instrumental colors, mixed and single: starting with horns and pizzicato strings, progressing through trumpet, clarinet, flute, piccolo and finally, oboe: (See also Klangfarbenmelodie.)

David Luce suggests that this implies that However, Robert Erickson argues that there are few regularities and they do not explain our "...powers of recognition and identification."

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.