(in the sense that you will know if you heard a piano or a guitar) what stayed the same and what changed with the sound wave? Second related question, if you get two people to say the word “hello” they will sound completely different but you will be able to hear that they both said hello. So in that case what changed with the sound wave and what stayed the same?
Sorry if it’s the wrong flair I put it as physics because sound waves so yeah
In: Physics
*Timbre* is the name for the quality of a sound. Musical instruments have timbres because they’re more than just a means to emit a tone of a certain frequency— they’re physical objects with characteristics.
Think of it like this— the fundamental note you play (frequency) is like a color. Say, the color yellow.
An egg yolk is very different from a child’s raincoat, isn’t it? Even if they’re both yellow.
In that way, the note A (440 kHz) produced by a violin is very different from that same note produced by a trumpet.
The differences are from stuff like how the sound is being produced, what amplifies it, and so on. The waveform making the sound “yellow” is accompanied by lots of overtones that carry the rest of the info.
For EL-older-than-5, look up “Fourier Transforms” and the history of synthesizers.
Sound is built up of loads of little parts. Things that have the same musical note have a really big bit they all share, but all the little bits are different (some things may not even have the same ones). So you hear the same note but it sounds different because of all the little bits add up differently. Think of a guitar and piano, they vibrate the same note in different ways because of their shape/size. Same principle for voices.
Overtones! There’s so much more to the quality of sound – called the *timbre* (pronounced TAM-burr) than just the principle tone.
Instruments produce lots of different pitch (frequency) notes at once, mainly the [harmonic series](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)).
The relative strength of all these tones together is what gives sound its colour. Check out the image at the top of that wikipedia article
A pure tone like say A defined as 440 Hz sounds nasty.
That’s what you get when you make a sound using a sine wave generator.
Just Google for some YouTube videos of examples.
Every single real world instrument when playing that same A note has 440Hz as the ‘defining’ frequency, but depending on the instrument there’s various side frequencies as well, that determine the actual sound quality.
Even something simple as whistling will at least have the overtones of double that major frequency present.
Pure sinus tones don’t sound pleasant. But mix and match dozens to hundreds of them and you have a non hash sounding tone.
The only sind every voice and instrument playing that A tone have in common, is that 440Hz plays a major role in the tone.
Every object has a natural frequency that they will vibrate at. However as well as that natural fundamental frequency they also have extra frequencies on top of it. These frequencies are double, triple, 4 times, 5 etc. These are called the overtones.
The strength of the overtones along with how the sound loudness over time changes gives the timbre, the sound that the instrument makes.
The thing that changed is the [timbre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbre).
A musical note can be defined in terms of its frequency – [how fast the thing is vibrating](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PETuX_pXLNU). If you think of a “pure” note as being one single frequency (440Hz, so 440 vibrations per second, in [this example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buimPG01gcs)), real life instruments never play just that. Instead, you get a mixture of that base frequency and all the multiples of that frequency: 880Hz, 1320Hz, 1760Hz, 2200Hz, and so on and so forth. These things are called [overtones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBobSVZJfo8).
The thing that makes different instruments sound different is that they emphasise some overtones and not others.
Honest recommendation – there’s a kid’s show on Netflix called “Storybots” and they have an episode about music that explains exactly this. Highly recommend! (And if you have kids/don’t mind kids TV, highly recommend this entire show!)
Everyone is saying timbre, but it’s not.
How the note sounds nominally is pretty much the same across all instruments, including the human voice; It’s the start and end profiles of the sound that allows us to.associate it with it’s instrument.
Paul Reed Smith, founder of PRS guitars has often used this anecdote when talking about the sound differences between different base woods for guitar bodies “ hickory is always going to sound different from maple the same way Barbara Streisand will always sound different from Frank Sinatra”
Even if you have two guitars tuned to the exact same frequency to the point where any other difference is understandable, the minor variations in the physical structure of the instrument will always create a slightly different sound
Basically, the instruments and people produce different overtones with the same note, which makes them sound unique. The fundamental frequency of the note stays the same, but the additional overtones change. Hope that helps!
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