Definition
Timbre is what allows a listener to distinguish two sounds that have otherwise the same subjective pitch, loudness, location, and duration. For instance, when orchestral musicians tune at the beginning of a concert, they all play the same note, but one can still tell the difference between instruments. This is largely because of timbre.
Detailed Description
The standard definition of timbre has several shortcomings. First, it says what timbre is not, rather than what it is. Second, it relates to the comparison between two sound tokens, whereas a more useful function for hearing is to associate a single timbre directly with a sound source (the timbre of the piano, the timbre of the voice of a friend). Perhaps as a consequence, there is still a lively debate about the acoustic features, mental representations, and neural mechanisms underlying timbre recognition. Here, we first outline the basic principles that make...
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Pressnitzer, D., Agus, T., Suied, C. (2015). Acoustic Timbre Recognition. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6675-8_98
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6675-8_98
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