This is actually question my daughter posed and I’m pretty stumped. She asked how, if two people with (let’s say) perfect pitch sing a song, how is it possible that we can still tell who is singing when the notes would be identical?
Note: I know absolutely nothing about music, but figured this was the best place to ask for her.
Edit: Wow, many of these answers are incredible! I had no idea this would receive such in depth and thoughtful feedback. I have learned a huge amount. I was not exaggerating above when I said I know nothing about music (I don’t even know what pitch is – just quoted my daughter on that) and I’m grateful to those of you who took the time to help me learn.
In: Biology
One of the components of a musical note is its *timbre* (pronounced TAM-bur). Timbre is all the sounds associated with the source that *aren’t* part of the pure tone.
Instruments (and the human voice – hereafter I’ll just say instrument, but it works the same either way) don’t produce a pure tone. The instrument creates the root frequency, the pitch you’re trying to make, and also overtones. Take a guitar string: it will vibrate at a particular frequency, and it will also vibrate at exactly twice that, and exactly thrice, and exactly four times, and etc. The shape of the instrument and what it’s made of and the size and shape and material of the main source of vibrations (lips, reeds, vocal cords, etc.) all change which overtones get amplified and which get diminished. Your ears can hear the differences in these overtones, although your brain filters it from your conscious perception of the sound unless you focus on it.
With a human voice, this includes the size and shape of your mouth and lungs and sinuses and skull and thickness of your skull and jaw and tongue and so on and so forth. All of these things change the overtones in subtle ways, so that even when the root pitch is the same the pitches around it won’t be.
Timbre also includes all the unique sounds that come from the instrument: things like key clicks or valve movements or breath noises or little scratchy bits in your voice, etc.
Edit: “That’s not how you pronounce ‘timbre!'”
[It is in American English.](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/timbre) It is at the very least *one* correct pronunciation in English. Yes, I know it’s borrowed from French but this comment isn’t in French, it’s in English. I don’t expect everyone on the internet to understand English, but if you’re reading this in the original that means you understand English. Some 60% of the English lexicon comes directly from French so if you’re gonna get upset every time someone pronounces a French word “wrong” in English you’re not going to get very far.
Latest Answers