[[Image:9577 Guitarz1970 Clean E9 Guitar Chord (Mike Tribulas).jpg|thumb|right|Spectrogram of the first second of an E9 chord played on a Fender Stratocaster guitar with noiseless pickups. Below is the E9 chord audio:

In music, timbre, also known as tone color, ( or ; ) is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. In psychoacoustics, timbre is also called ''tone quality'' and ''tone color''.

In simple terms, timbre is what makes a particular musical sound different from another, even when they have the same pitch and loudness. For instance, it is the difference between a guitar and a piano playing the same note at the same loudness. Experienced musicians are able to distinguish between different instruments based on their varied timbres, even if those instruments are playing notes at the same pitch and loudness.

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).

American Standards Association definition

The American Standards Association definition 12.9 of timbre describes it as "that attribute of sensation in terms of which a listener can judge that two sounds having the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar", and a note to this definition 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" (American Standards Association 1960, 45).

Attributes

Timbre has been called a "wastebasket" attribute (Dixon Ward 1965, 55) or category (Tobias 1970, 409), or "the psychoacoustician's multidimensional waste-basket category for everything that cannot be labeled pitch or loudness" (McAdams and Bregman 1979, 34).

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) finds "scaled to the concerns of much contemporary music":

# The range between tonal and noiselike character. # The spectral envelope. # The time envelope in terms of rise, duration, and decay (ADSR—attack, decay, sustain, release). # The changes both of spectral envelope (formant-glide) and fundamental frequency (micro-intonation). # 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'' | ''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 produced by a musical instrument 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 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. Sometimes there are also subharmonics at whole number ''divisions'' of the fundamental frequency. Most western instruments produce harmonic sounds, but many instruments produce partials and inharmonic tones, such as cymbals and other indefinite-pitched instruments.

When the orchestral tuning note is played, the sound is a combination of 440 Hz, 880 Hz, 1320 Hz, 1760 Hz and so on. Each instrument in the orchestra will produce a different combination of these frequencies, as well as harmonics and overtones. The sound waves of the different frequencies will overlap and combine, and it is the balance of these amplitudes that 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 (Sethares 1998, 6, 211, 318).

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. 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.

Timbre in music history

The music of Debussy, composed during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, has been credited with elevating the role of timbre in music: "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" (Samson 1977, ).

Psychoacoustic evidence

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". 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, 16) 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, 11).

Psychoacoustic experiments from the 1960s onwards tried to elucidate the nature of timbre. One method involves playing pairs of sounds to listeners and then using a multidimensional scaling algorithm to aggregate their dissimilarity judgements 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.

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.

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 0882756044

Dixon Ward, W. (1970) "Musical Perception". In ''Foundations of Modern Auditory Theory'' vol. 1, edited by Jerry V. Tobias, . New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0126919011.

Erickson, Robert (1975). ''Sound Structure in Music''. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02376-5.

Grey, John M. (1977). "Multidimensional Perceptual Scaling of Musical Timbres". ''The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'' 61(5):1270–77.

Lakatos, S. (2000). "A Common Perceptual Space for Harmonic and Percussive Timbres". ''Perception & Psychophysics'' 62(7):1426–39. PMID 11143454.

Luce, David A. (1963). "Physical Correlates of Nonpercussive Musical Instrument Tones", Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

McAdams, Stephen, and Albert Bregman (1979). "Hearing Musical Streams". ''Computer Music Journal'' 3, no. 4 (December): 26–43, 60.

Samson, Jim (1977). ''Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900-1920''. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-02193-9.

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, 35–44, 90. Tokyo: Maruzen; Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Sethares, William (1998). ''Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale''. Berlin, London, and New York: Springer. ISBN 3-540-76173-X.

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".

Category:French words and phrases Category:French loanwords Category:Timbre Category:Opera terminology

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name	Timber Timbre
background	group_or_band
origin	Brooklin, Ontario, Canada
genre	Folk, blues
years active	–present
label	Arts & Crafts, Out of This Spark, Full Time Hobby
website
current members	Taylor KirkSimon TrottierMika Posen }}

Timber Timbre is a Canadian folk music project, featuring Mika Posen, Simon Trottier and Taylor Kirk. The moniker refers to an early series of recordings made in a timber-framed cabin set in the wooded outskirts of Bobcaygeon, Ontario.

Timber Timbre released two albums independently before releasing a self-titled album on Out of This Spark in January 2009. They were subsequently signed to Arts & Crafts, who re-released the album on June 30 in Canada and July 28 internationally. The album was named as a longlist nominee for the 2009 Polaris Music Prize on June 15, 2009, and was deemed album of the year by ''Eye Weekly''.

The band's song "Magic Arrow" was featured in the television show ''Breaking Bad'', in the episode "Caballo Sin Nombre", as well as in the TV series ''The Good Wife'', in the episode "Bitcoin for Dummies".

On June 16, 2011, the band's fourth album ''Creep On Creepin' On'' was named as a longlisted nominee for the 2011 Polaris Music Prize. On July 6, the album was named as a short listed (one of ten) nominee for the 2011 award.

Sound

Timber Timbre's sound has been described as "an aesthetic rooted in swampy, ragged blues" and "beautifully restrained blues from an alternate universe", which creates an atmosphere that is cinematic and spooky.

Members

Taylor Kirk (Vocals, Guitar, Baritone Guitar, Bass Guitar, Keyboards, Drums, Loops)

Simon Trottier (Autoharp, Lapsteel, Electric Guitar, Baritone Guitar, Percussion, Loops, Sampler)

Mika Posen (Violin, Viola, Keyboards, Percussion, Loops)

Discography

''Cedar Shakes'' (2006)

''Medicinals'' (2007)

''Timber Timbre'' (2009)

''Creep On Creepin' On'' (2011)

Compilations

''Friends in Bellwoods II'' (2009): "Water"

Other credits

Kirk and Trottier have also produced albums for other artists, including the full-length debut album by Tasseomancy.

References

External links

Timber Timbre

Category:Musical groups established in 2005 Category:Musical groups from Toronto Category:Canadian folk rock groups Category:Arts & Crafts Productions artists Category:Musical trios

de:Timber Timbre fr:Timber Timbre ru:Timber Timbre