Timbre describes the quality or character of a musical sound and helps distinguish between different instruments. It is produced by the combination of a sound's fundamental frequency and its overtones. The fundamental is the lowest frequency, while the overtones or harmonics are integer multiples of the fundamental that give each instrument its unique tone color. Composers use timbre purposefully to portray different emotions in their music.

1. Timbre
Introduction to Music Production
Week 1 Assignment
Lindsey Grenet

2. Introduction
Hi, my name is Lindsey. I’m from Sydney,
Australia.
For our first assignment, I have chosen to
examine the concept of timbre in more
detail.

3. What is timbre?
In music, timbre (pronounced TAM-ber)
describes the quality or character of a
sound or voice.
Timbre helps your ears distinguish one type
of sound production from another. For
example, the sound of your cat from your
dog.
It is also referred to as tone colour or tone
quality.

4. What is timbre?
Timbre also helps us to differentiate
instruments, even when they are playing
the same pitch at the same volume.
The flute, violin and glockenspiel can all play
the same note at the same volume but
sound very different due to their timbre.

5. How does this work?
To understand timbre, we need to have a
look at the property of sound it is related
to:

6. Frequency: the amount of repeated
sound waves produced in one second

7. Frequency
Each repetition of a waveform is called a
cycle
Frequency measures cycles per second or
Hertz (Hz) per second

8. Frequency
Human hearing ranges roughly:
20 Hz – 20,000 Hz or 20Khz

9. Frequency
In music, we hear changes in frequency as
changes in the pitch.
A high pitched note will have a greater
number of sound wave repetitions per
second than a lower pitched note.

10. Frequency
More repetitions per second = higher
frequency

11. How can we measure timbre?
First, the instrument or voice needs to produce a
sound.
instruments or this vibration is energy at
voices play or sing multiple frequencies
a note and create a occurring simultaneously
vibration

12. The fundamental
The frequency with the slowest rate is called
the fundamental. It is also heard the
loudest.

13. Harmonics
The other frequencies are either
harmonics, overtones or enharmonics.

14. Harmonics
The example from our lesson in ‘Visualising
Sound’ helps us understand the
relationship between the fundamental and
the harmonics or, what we call notes in the
harmonic series.

15. Harmonics
db
Hz
Using a saw tooth wave, we can see that timbre is
shown as peaks at a number of frequencies in the
spectrum analyser

16. Harmonics
This peak is the fundamental

17. Harmonics
db
Hz
These peaks are called harmonics. Each harmonic is an
integer multiple of the fundamental.

18. Harmonics
If the fundamental here was 25Hz, the frequencies of the
harmonics would be 50Hz, 75Hz, 100Hz etc
(The harmonics become harder to hear the higher they
go, which is why the peaks get shorter in this graph)

19. Harmonics
Every sound we hear has a different
combination of a fundamental frequency
and notes in the harmonic series, which
gives each sound a unique timbre.

20. How do we describe tone
colour?
When listening to a voice or instrument, we
can use words to describe how they sound.
For example, the voices
of the Simpsons characters:
Marge: raspy, scratchy
Bart: bright, clear
Homer: warm, round

21. Listening examples
You can also use describing words for
instruments of the orchestra.
For example:
Piccolo: bright, shrill
Flute: light, airy
Oboe: warm, nasal Listen to these woodwind
instrument excerpts and have a go
at describing the tone colour of
each

22. Why is timbre important in
music?
Composers have many instruments to choose
from in their compositions.
Each instrument can be used to portray
different emotions and moods.
A carefully chosen instrument can really
enhance a piece of music.

23. Conclusion
Timbre in music is a broad concept that can be
examined both scientifically, in analysis, and
subjectively, in the way we hear it.
We have only scratched the surface, so feel free to
do your own research into this vast and
interesting component of sound.
Thank you for your time and efforts in marking this
assignment!