Quality of tone or sound. (Stainer, John; Barrett, W.A.; A Dictionary of Musical Terms; Novello, Ewer and Co., London, pre-1900)
"Sounds are "communicated" when they are merely conveyed from one sounding body to another, and this can take place in a noise as well as a musical sound. Sounds are "excited" under two circumstances: when a body which is sounding and that to be excited have the same note and the vibration of one produces sympathetic vibration of the other, the bodies are mutually called "reciprocating", while of the vibration of one produces its harmonics in the other, the latter is said, with regard to the exciting body, to be "resonant". According to Helmholtz, "timbre" or "quality" depends on definite combinations or certain secondary sounds or harmonics with a primary or fundamental sound, and such combinations he calls "sound colours". (Stainer, John; Barrett, W.A.; A Dictionary of Musical Terms; Novello, Ewer and Co., London, pre-1900)
Tim"bre, n. (F., a bell to be struck with a hammer, sound, tone, stamp, crest, in OF., a timbrel. Cf. Timbrel.)
1. (Mus.) The quality or tone distinguishing voices or instruments; tone color; clang tint; as, the timbre of the voice; the timbre of a violin.
Variant(s): also timber /'tam-b&r, 'tim-; 'tam(br&)/
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Middle French, bell struck by a hammer, from Old French, drum, from Middle Greek tymbanon kettledrum, from Greek tympanon - more at TYMPANUM
Date: 1849
: the quality given to a sound by its overtones: the resonance by which the ear recognizes and identifies a voiced speech : the quality of tone distinctive of a particular singing voice or musical instrument
- timĀ·bral /'tam-br&l, 'tim-/ adjective
All those qualities of a sound that make it distinctive. (Friend, David; Learning Music with Synthesizers; Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation, 1974)
Ramsay
Helmholtz falls into a mistake when he says- "The system of scales and modes, and all the network of harmony founded on them, do not seem to rest on any immutable laws of Nature, but are due to the aesthetical principle which is constantly subject to change, according to the progressive development of taste." It is true, indeed, that the ear is the last judge; but the ear is to judge something which it does not create, but simply judges. Nature is the maker of music in its scales and modes. The styles of composition may vary with successive generations, and in the different nations of men; but the scientific basis of music is another thing. It is a thing, belonging to the aesthetic element of our being and our environment; it is under the idea of the beautiful, rather than the idea of the useful or the just; but all these various aspects of our relation to creation have their laws which underlie whatever changes may be fashionable at any period in our practice. If the clang-farbe of a musical tone, that is, its quality or timbre, depends on the number and comparative strength of the partial tones or harmonics of which it is composed, and this is considered to be the great discovery of Helmholtz, it cannot be that the scales and modes are at the caprice of the fickle and varied taste of times and individuals, for these partials are under Nature's mathematical usages, and quite beyond any taste for man's to change. It is these very partials or harmonics brought fully into view as a system, and they lead us back and back till they have brought us to the great all-prevading law of gravitation; it is these very partials, which clothe as an audible halo every musical sound, which constitute the musical system of sounds. [Scientific Basis and Build of Music, page 78]
See Also