These patterns are so distinctive that they are critical to our ability to recognize different instruments. When the attack is removed from a sound and we hear only the sustained tone that follows, even trained musicians find it difficult to identify the instrument by ear. The attack-decay envelope describes how quickly the sound builds to its maximum volume, fades, and ultimately stops.
Most instruments do not reach their peak volume instantaneously, but over the course of several milliseconds. The decay of a sound is defined by how long it takes the sound to stop after the original force that caused the vibration has stopped.
That is, if you pluck the string of a guitar or press a key on a piano and let it ring, how long does it take the sound to stop? The duration and nature of the attack-decay envelope also contributes to the overall timbre of an instrument.
The purity or impurity of a tone, or the amount and type of noise included in the sound, is another important aspect of timbre. United Kingdom. Visit us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Visit us on Twitter. Follow us on Instagram. View on Instagram. Subscribe on YouTube. Visit us on YouTube. Code of conduct. There are four main classifications of the voice, these include from the highest to the lowest — soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. There are two other voice types — mezzo soprano and baritone.
The human voice is categorized by the range and register of the notes that it can perform. Not all instruments that you can hear fit neatly into the instrument families from the orchestra. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs together devised a system to categorize instruments in the early part of the 2oth Century. This system was based on another one devised by Victor-Charles Mahillon.
Mahillon divided instruments into four broad categories. These were based on the method of sound production material — moving air column, strings, membrane and body of the instrument. Hornbostel and Sachs based their instrument classification system on the Dewey Decimal Classification used in libraries.
This musical instrument classification comes under five broad headings, and almost subheadings! The five main categories are aerophones, chordophones, idiophones, membranophones and electric sounds or electrophones.
Aerophones — these instruments require moving air to make a sound. Examples of aerophone instruments include — flute, recorder, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, cor anglais, french horn, piccolo, pan flute, harmonica, and ocarina. Chordophones — a chordophone is an instrument with strings.
There are several ways to make a sound with these instruments from bowing, plucking and strumming. Chordophones include the guitar, violin, cello, harp, mandolin, banjo, double bass, lute, hurdy gurdy, dombra, charango, bouzouki, and many more. Idiophones — an idiophone is an instrument that is hit, shaken or scraped to make a sound. These instruments include the cymbals, guiro, tambourine, xylophone, glockenspiel, balaphon, mbira, slit drum, rattle, triangle, bell, Gamelan, tapping sticks, wood block, maracas, vibraphone, and too many more to list here!
Membranophones — a membranophone is an instrument that has a skin or membrane stretched across it. This group of instruments includes most drums such as the snare drum, bass, drum, bongo, tambour, djembe, talking drum, dun dun, congas, timpani, bodhran, tabla, darbuka, khol, and again, many more drums from all parts of the globe. Electric Sounds or Electrophones — electric sounds, or electrophones, are instruments that require electricity to make a sound. These include instruments such as the electric guitar, bass guitar, electric piano, organ, synthesizer, theremin, Hammond Organ, electric drum kit and countless others.
Another aspect of what is timbre in music, is the method of sound production by the performer on an individual instrument. Each musical instrument has several ways that a sound can be produced or even altered by the performer. The techniques used will depend on the type of instrument and how a sound is naturally made.
An example of a different timbre or tone colour produced on an instrument could be on the violin. On the violin the performer can make a sound that is bowed, plucked, double stopped, triple stopped or even a sound can be made by using the wood of the bow instead! The same melody could be played, each with a different technique, and each time the timbre of the instrument would be different and would make the melody sound different. When describing the action used to produce a sound, it can generally come under the following musical techniques — blowing, singing, tapping, hitting, pressing, strumming, picking, plucking, scraping, humming, sliding, screaming, growling, and flutter tonguing.
To describe the timbre of an instrument, you will need to use an adjective. In the table below are some adjectives that you can use to describe the timbre of an instrument, feel free to create your own list of words that you can use to describe the tone colour of an instrument in the music you like to listen to. There are four main roles that an instrument can perform in any given piece of music.
Please note that not every piece of music will have an instrument in each of these roles. When you order a meal, you order the main ingredient, for example, the steak. The steak is the hero of the meal, the main part, just like the melody is the main part that people remember in the music. The other parts that come with your steak, like some fries, a salad and a yummy sauce, all add to the steak to make it more enjoyable to eat.
Because they contain all harmonics in the series, sawtooth waves are the best candidates for subtractive synthesis. The most common move in subtractive synthesis is to shape a rich harmonic signal, like string pads, from a brilliant to mellow timbre by closing and opening the filter. And it looks a lot like how it sounds. So far, we have looked at how the fundamental and harmonic frequencies of a sound influence timbre, mostly with simple, static waves.
Like I mentioned earlier on, timbre is also greatly affected by the envelope of a sound. An envelope shapes the loudness and spectral content of a sound over time using four parameters: attack, decay, sustain, and release, abbreviated as ADSR. To get a better understanding of how envelope relates to timbre, take a piano recording and reverse it.
When the piano plays forward in time, we hear and see that each note goes from silence to its maximum amplitude immediately after being triggered. The decay time is fast, and the sustain level remains constant until the note is released—a recognisable piano envelope. Playing the piano recording backwards reverses the envelope structure. Each note has a gradual increase towards its maximum amplitude, then an abrupt drop to silence.
The frequency distribution and intensity of each note is the same in both directions, but the backward timbre is completely different. The resonant frequencies in the recording are emphasized and the reversed piano hammer introduces a strange, flickering texture. The human voice is one of the most recognizable sounds around us.
We rely on the timbral characteristics of a voice to determine gender and age and to pick out the familiar voices of friends and family in crowded spaces. Connecting timbral characteristics of the voice with frequencies is an essential skill for for recording, producing and mixing. The emotional transformation of a song is reliant on changes in vocal timbre. To make a chorus sound more energetic, a vocalist will sing softly and in a lower register during a verse for contrast. This style of singing in the verse produces a dark or mellow timbre.
In the spectrogram of the chorus vocal below, harmonic intensity remains high until 5 kHz, whereas verse harmonics begin to taper off around 2 kHz.
There is more high frequency information in the 7—12 kHz range here too.
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