Does This Timber Have The Right Timbre
The first two meanings timbre had in English (it referred to a kind of drum and to the crest on a coat of arms) are now too obscure for entry in this dictionary, but its third meaning survives. Timbre in modern English generally refers to the quality of a sound made by a particular voice or musical instrument; timbre is useful in being distinct from pitch, intensity, and loudness as a descriptor of sound.
Does This Timber Have The Right Timbre
But because English is rarely simple about such things, we have also these facts: timber is listed as a variant spelling of timbre. And timbre may also be correctly pronounced just like timber as \TIM-ber\. And the spelling of timber was unsettled for many years; it was sometimes spelled tymmer, tymber, and, yes, timbre. The messy overlapping of these similar words is coincidental: the consequence of the intersection of the different cultures and languages that left their traces on English.
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.
Tone quality and tone color are synonyms for timbre, as well as the "texture attributed to a single instrument". However, the word texture can also refer to the type of music, such as multiple, interweaving melody lines versus a singable melody accompanied by subordinate chords. 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.[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. There are also colors of noise, such as pink and white. In visual representations of sound, timbre corresponds to the shape of the image,[2] while loudness corresponds to brightness; pitch corresponds to the y-shift of the spectrogram.
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]
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.
The term "brightness" is also used in discussions of sound timbres, in a rough analogy with visual brightness. Timbre researchers consider brightness to be one of the perceptually strongest distinctions between sounds,[14] and formalize it acoustically as an indication of the amount of high-frequency content in a sound, using a measure such as the spectral centroid.
Timbre was annoyed that Venli wanted to accomplish the rescue without revealing her Radiant abilities, instead pretending to have acquired a Shardblade. As Venli approached the back of the cell, however, Timbre encouraged her. The spren pulsed to the Rhythm of Hope, feeding the rhythm into the rock and aiding Venli's displacement of the rock. As Venli worked to make a hole large enough for Lift, Timbre observed that her efforts were rough and crude, pulsing to Consolation. As soon as Lift was free, Timbre happily switched and attuned Hope. Venli asked if she could say the words of her Second Ideal yet, now that Lift was free, but Timbre replied that it wasn't the right time; Venli would know when it was right.[26]
Aside from their similarity in spelling and sound (where timbre is not pronounced in the French manner), the words have nothing in common. Timber has roots in Old English, and though it has borne several senses over the centuries, it has remained more or less the same since its earliest documented use in the second half of the first millennium A.D.1 Timbre, meanwhile, has a long history in French, where it has historically referred primarily to bells and helmets, but it did not enter English until the late 19th century,2 which makes it well over a millennium newer to English than timber.
Every voice has its own distinguished timbre. Singers, specially trained singers, can change that timbre in a way that can alter the sound within the overtones and frequencies, giving a brand new sound to life, with a different color, quality, and tone. Identifying the ways in which singers can achieve this change in timbre will allow you the ability to be more versatile within your singing career.
Understanding your vocal type will aid you in how you can change it to fit a different timbre. You have a natural tone to your voice, but in order to change it, you have to look at these factors going into it: breath or forced air, strength, vowel sounds, headspace, use of vibrato, etc. so you can use those factors to enhance richness or darken, lighten or go higher or lower within your voice type.
You have to be aware and be in tune with yourself, as well as maintain strong physical and mental capacity. Vocal exercises will have to be done frequently, as in almost every day, to keep your voice in shape and give you the ability to work on obtaining your new timbre.
Ultimately, getting help from a voice coach and taking lessons is the best route for you to start on your journey; it will allow you the ability to explore your voice, give you the tools you need to work on and provide you with the power to achieve those new and different qualities to reflect personality, depth, emotion, and characteristics within a song. Understanding and learning about timbre and the factors you can utilize to change it, particularly by developing the right techniques to train your voice gives you the ability to alter your sound.
As one of the basic elements in acoustic events, timbre influences the brain collectively with other factors such as pitch and loudness. Research on timbre perception involve interdisciplinary fields, including physical acoustics, auditory psychology, neurocognitive science and music theory, etc. From the perspectives of psychology and physiology, this article summarizes the features and functions of timbre perception as well as their correlation, among which the multi-dimensional scaling modeling methods to define timbre are the focus; the neurocognition and perception of timbre (including sensitivity, adaptability, memory capability, etc.) are outlined; related experiment findings (by using EEG/ERP, fMRI, etc.) on the deeper level of timbre perception in terms of neural cognition are summarized. In the meantime, potential problems in the process of experiments on timbre perception and future possibilities are also discussed. Thought sorting out the existing research contents, methods and findings of timbre perception, this article aims to provide heuristic guidance for researchers in related fields of timbre perception psychology, physiology and neural mechanism. It is believed that the study of timbre perception will be essential in various fields in the future, including neuroaesthetics, psychological intervention, artistic creation, rehabilitation, etc.
Copyright 2022 Wei, Gan and Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
In this article, we will explore the meaning of timbre, texture, and tone in music. We will define each concept on its own and explore some of the intricacies and possible contradictions inside of each idea. Then, we will discuss how we can train our ears to use each concept. When you are ready, dive in!
This means that for every single key you press on the piano, there are actually 16 different harmonics, or overtones, inside of that pitch. So, essentially timbre in music refers to the sound qualities produced by the balance of these overtones in the harmonic series. Every instrument, even instruments in the same family, will have a different timbre based on their construction and relationship to the harmonic series. This is why no two pianos will ever sound exactly the same.
The third way tone is used in music is more akin to timbre. Tone can refer to specific qualities of sound. For example, dynamic markings in music have an effect on tone. If you play the piano forte in the low end, it produces a darker, heavier, and louder tone than if you play piano in the high end.
Then try to identify the different elements as they occur. Can you identify the first instrument based on its timbre? What is the texture of the piece at the beginning? Is it monophonic or homophonic? When does the texture become polyphonic? What is the tone of the piece? Is it dark or light? Is it heavier or happier? Are the intervals of the melody wide or small?