Where does timbre collide?

In acoustics and music, timbre is the attribute that lets a listener tell apart two tones of the same pitch, loudness, and duration, which is why a flute and a violin playing the same note sound different. It arises mainly from the relative strengths of a tone's partials (its spectral envelope) together with how the sound begins and evolves in time, especially the attack transient. Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone grounded it in the harmonic spectrum, and later work such as Grey's multidimensional scaling mapped it as a perceptual space with several independent dimensions. The referent is a perceptual quality of sound, not a helmet above a shield or the quality of a spoken vowel, which carry the same word for unrelated things.[1][2]

Unit

The perceived tone-color of a sound, described by its spectral and temporal shape

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Characterised by spectral-envelope measures and by multidimensional perceptual scaling of listener dissimilarity judgments

In phonetics the timbre of a speech sound is its characteristic quality, above all the identity of a vowel, set by the resonances of the vocal tract rather than by pitch or loudness. Shaping the tract into different configurations moves the formant frequencies, and it is this pattern of resonances that makes [i] sound different from [a] at the same pitch. Peterson and Barney's measurements of American English vowels and Fant's Acoustic Theory of Speech Production tied vowel timbre to formant structure. The referent is the resonance-defined quality of a speech sound, a sibling idea to the acoustician's timbre, yet a distinct construct about linguistic identity rather than instrument color.[3][4]

Unit

The vowel quality of a speech sound, fixed by its formant pattern

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Indexed by formant frequencies (F1, F2, …) extracted from the speech spectrum