Digital Media Curriculum Materials


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Grants & Projects > Digital Media Curriculum Development Project > Demonstration: Timbre, Complex Sound, and Single Tone

Introduction:
Timbre refers to the perceptual difference of two sounds of identical pitch and loudness. In music, timbre refers to the quality of a musical note which distinguishes different types of musical instrument. For example, a same note played on a piano sounds different from that played on a harp. In principle, timbre is not limited to musical notes. Anything that somehow produces sound can be considered as a musical instrument, for instance, the human voice.

Almost all the sounds we encounter in everyday life are complex sounds which are made up with various frequencies at different intensities, for examples, speech and the musical notes generated by different musical instruments (as demonstrated below). This is in contrast to a single tone that contains a single frequency of sound (as demonstrated below).

Demonstrations:
In this demonstration, there are 11 different examples of sound, 10 of which are sounds of a same musical note of different musical instruments. One is a single tone. Each sound is demonstrated with:

an audio (.wav file): a 1.2-second audio
figures:
- the audio's waveform
- the zoom-in view (0.015-second) of the audio's waveform

Both columns below list the exact same sounds so you can compare different waveforms side-by-side.

A Single Tone of 261 Hz
play sound (~108 KB) | show waveform...