So if an A is 440hz, why does a piano playing an A sound different than a violin, a guitar, or someone’s voice making that same A 440 note? It’s obvious that the pitch is the same on each instrument but each instrument has a distinct sound. I’ve never heard an A on a piano and thought, is that a piano or a cello. Why can we distinguish between instruments?
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Among tone/timbre and tone/timbre envelope which others said, there is another reason instruments sounds the way they do and I would say it is as important as the overtones and the frequencies involved.
That’s the volume envelope. That’s how the volume changes in time, a guitar or a piano will have a fast attack and fast release. While a gong will have a very slooooooow release as once hit it will continue sounding for more than a second. A cello will have a slow attack due the arch needs time to resonate with the string so its like a fade in, while the piano has a hammer that hits so it’s like a big volume for just milliseconds.
In electronics synthesizers envelope plays a role as important as the tone. For example you can model from a flute to a tubular bell or a music-box using the same tone (sine wave) but using different envelopes. The flute has small variations of volume due to breath or vibrato but it’s mostly constant, the tubular bell starts instantly but the volume fade away sloooowly, and the musix box is like an instant hit, it start and ends in a fraction of second.
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