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Timbre Is More Complicated Than You Think

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What is timbre? It's one of those weird things that seems obvious when you think about it intuitively, but is actually impossible to define.
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*DISCLAIMER: The drone/rhythmic click FFT example was an exaggerated/oversimplified example to get the point across. It's just not possible to explain everything in detail in a 10 minute video! The more detailed explanation is this: The FFT takes little chunks of sound to analyze and depending on the size of the chunk, either the frequency time scale or rhythm time scale is more accurately rendered. There's more than just two chunk sizes, as my example would suggest, but the moral of the story is: for every bit of frequency accuracy you gain, you lose a bit of rhythm accuracy. You can't get both at the same time. If you wanna go deeper: en.wikipedia.o...
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(1) Luce, David A. (1963). "Physical Correlates of Nonpercussive Musical Instrument Tones"
(2) Erickson, Robert (1975). Sound Structure in Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02376-5.

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27 авг 2024

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Комментарии : 79

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

Hey everyone! Timbre and spectrum are terms that are often confused in the audio world. I just wanted to clarify that timbre definitionally relies on human perception. Here's an article quoting multiple leading psychologists who study psychoacoustics to verify this fact! www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5632649/

@CharlesFerraro 2 года назад

I expected someone in the comments to talk about how timbre is the spectral balance of a sound. I figured that’s why you made this clarifying comment… But I couldn’t find anything in the comments that touched on that. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Anyway yes, I do think that timbre is defined by the spectral balance of a sound. You have your theoretical sine waves at their own pitches amplitudes and phase. That is timbre. Or at least that is the cause of what your brain will interpret as timbre. Someone in the comments did talk about color. You have your primaries that can create any color that the human eye can perceive. Now whether you and I perceive the same color is unknown. I would take that step though and say yes, we almost certainly do see the same colors. We are the same machines genetically. Spectral balance equals timbre just as primary color balance equals color. Hmm… with color though… it’s not like those primary colors are IN the object. The object’s color is determined by it’s atomic structure and how electrons jump. With audio it’s kindof the same. Those sine waves aren’t vibrating discreetly and then summed... The waveshape produced by the object is determined by physical attributes like length, consistency, tension etc. The color of light can be described as a balance of primaries just as timbre can be described as a spectral balance of sines without necessarily being primary colors or sine waves. Confusing.

@maxheadrom3088 Год назад

Very complete! I saw a couple of papers that used the following method: the researchers played pair of sounds to musicians and asked them to say how much, from zero to 10, they were different. By doing this they got a bunch o sound pairs and the distance between them. Notice that hey had the distance between a flute and a piano, a piano and a clarinete and a flute and a clarinate, for instance. Using the example we (three sounds and three distances) we can now build a triangle. A plane is defined by two dimentions - the x and y axis. They then got measurements off of the sounds and tried to find if those two axis meant something. In reality, they got a huge number of pairs and a huge number of opinions (the distances from zero to 10). They used statistics to normalize the opinions (if one musician never said a pair was distant by more than 4 they would stretch his numbers so 4=10). After that they did something that requires a lot of math to solve: they had to find the positions for the points in a plane or 3 dimensional space in a way that all the distances matched the different opinions from the different musicians about different pairs. Unfortunately I read the papers some 20 years ago and don't have them at hand but I remember one result: one of the axis represented the energy in the first milliseconds - that is, the attack. The attack is indeed important and other psychoacoustics research had shown that if we strip the attack out of a sound we have difficulty in differentiatint different sounds. The idea that timbre could be explained as the different contributions of each harmonic to the whole sound was proposed by Helmholtz and was accepted for a long time. Probably with the musical revolution of the 20th century (Varese, Cage ...) people started to ask themselves if Helmholtz idea really explained it all. The experiments that distorted the envelopes without changing the spectrum showed the German phisicist's idea indeed left a lot unexplained. Your video is excellent and very complete. You also managed to make a difficult topic easier to understand. Thank you! ... I however can't help myself from making one explanation and one suggestion. Explanation: FFT is the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm and it behaves exactly like you explained. It's different, though, from the Fourier Transform - something somewhat weird as you'll see. To find the Fourier transform I have to integrate something that is a function of time - like sin(t) or something else(t) - starting with t at minus infinity and going all the way to plus infinity. That means I have to know not only all the past of the signal but also all the future of the signal!!! We can't do that to get the real time spectrum of a signal and even if we do it after we got the whole signal it will have no temporal resolution. There are cases, however, that allow us to use a trick - the case of a signal that oscilates always in the same way. For those signals, if I have 1 period of the signal I know all the past and the future. The transform is actually really useful: in the original mini Moog, for instance, when you selected square, triangle or saw waves you were actually selecting a bank of sinusoidal oscilators that when all of them were added produced an almost perfect triangle and so forth wave. The phase and intensity of those oscilators come from the Fourier Transform. I'll actually make two suggestions: 1) If possible, don't even mention Fourier because people will get spooked. I think you don't even need to say what the acronym FFT means. I studied electric engineering and we use another transfomation, the Laplace Transform. The Fourier Transform is part of the fourier transforms but even though it's simpler, people don't like to do the math - they like the Laplace transform a lot more. For electric engineers, those two transforms are the bread and butter + the coffe with cream of their profession ... and Fourier never ceases to spook them! 2) Explain what the spectrum image means. I think, however, that your audience already know that. The reason I really liked your video and spent so much time making this comment is I really liked how you managed to explain the subject without all the boring and scary math that mathematicians and engineers use, fruitlessly, when they explain the same subject to musicians. It's somethingt like this: engineers and mathematicians know all the rules involved in tonal harmony - the fundamental, the fourth, the fith, the change from major to minor ... all in our brains. Musicians feel the rules in their souls and feel how strange the change from major to minor is. Wow ... I got so poetic - but a bit pathetic! 🤠

@afourtrackmind 3 года назад

It's rare I learn something new about sound, thank you. The cochlea and wavelength focus is intuitive. Very good.

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

Love to hear it! Thank you. Glad you got something new out of it :)

@strangehermitage2299 3 года назад

You're smart, kooky and funny. Cool, I've subscribed.

@cruxide9312 3 года назад

I'm very new to audio and have been researching and learning music theory and sound engineering for about a year and a half now. Watching this video got me more excited to learn more on the subject and made me ecstatic to go to high school and learn more about it.

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

I loooove to hear this news! I'm so glad this video inspired you and I wish you the best with your studies :)

@avalontassonyi 3 года назад

This channel is bout blow up I can FEEL IT

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

hahaha well i wouldn't kick that out of bed!

@ChrisLeeW00 3 года назад

Timbre is Ear feel

@OhadLutzky 3 года назад

Nit! (Wonderful video, I'm just one of those nerds here to nitpick, maybe some other viewer will find this interesting) FFT is short for *Fast* Fourier Transform. This is a computational algorithm for performing a Discrete Fourier transform (a Fourier transform of a finite series of numbers, e.g. a digital representation of a signal), both quickly and with higher accuracy than straightforward algorithms. Indeed it is commonly used by computer software displaying or operating on spectrums. Furthermore, a Fourier transform generally operates on an *entire* signal - i.e. the input is one "amplitude-over-time" series, and the output is one "amplitude-over-frequency" series. The examples shown as Spectrograms are generated by an STFT - Short-time Fourier Transform - which is essentially a series of Fourier transforms for short durations of time (so you get two axes - X for time and Y for frequency). Indeed, there are FFT-based mechanisms for computing STFTs. Human hearing likely does not perform a computational FFT algorithm, but I think it can reasonably be assumed to do something similar to an STFT.

@Geopholus 2 года назад

It is really nice to have an intelligent comment. Yes FFT is Fast Fourier Transform and is a technique for mathematically analyzing a periodic waveform into a series of harmonics (sine waves) to accurately reproduce a periodic waveform. In the 1940's until the 1970's or so, it was widely taught, by electronic music enthusiasts or even Lenny Bernstein, that timbre was defined by waveform. IE: because sounds that "have" the same pitch have the same number of cycles per second, and the only thing that should be different, between those notes, that would give a sound its character, would be their respective waveforms. This kinda flew in the face of the obvious , like the envelope should play some part, but the idea that the waveform was pretty constant for a given instrument , and only the loudness was varying over time, with the envelope, and therefore not too important, also was assumed. As the use of analogue synthesizers with the ability to change lots of parameters became more ubiquitous, and sampling and recording of waveforms on digital platforms with graphic displays became more widespread, it became obvious to a lot of us in the field, that waveform (and not necessarily periodic), and attack, decay, and reverb transients, quick pitch modulations, the envelopes of the harmonic and non harmonic tones all play a role in what we call timbre: the sensation of an individualized musical voice. Check Wendy Carlos on her harmonic synthesis with a computer, and synthesis of a xylophone, by adding some non harmonic transients at the beginning, what she called a "shake" ... YT Video, W Carlos on her new computerized synth.. One may also start with virtually the same waveform, and just by changing the envelope, plus bandpass over the course of time, make a sound that could be a pretty accurate cello, or piano, or saxophone. it also turns out that the phase relationships of individual harmonics, or a fair amount of variation in the brightness or darkness of a sample doesn't necessarily throw it out, as an accurate representation of the timbre of a given instrument. It is my contention that the brain is somehow conveyed a pretty accurate representation of waveform over time. if You doubt this, You will find that You can change individual periods of a sample, or small changes in the evolution of a waveform , and hear the difference. Sharp waveforms sound sharp, and round waveforms sound round. Another thing about certain repeating waveforms that are non the less not representative of resilient vibrations... You can make electronic waveforms in which the period of the positive going and negative going peaks are related by an irrational number. Certain of these cannot be fourier transformed to a high degree of accuracy, although You can come quite close as long as the first pair of peaks and valleys are followed by another pair in reverse order, or opposite polarity. Try tuning up a pulse wave with irrational sequential zero crossings, they never sound in tune. Some of the growl of a bass viol represent a similar phenomenon. On another aspect of math and music. Let us once and for all stop talking about partials, and stick to the following rule for discussing harmonics for the sake of clarity. The fundamental, is the first harmonic, because a frequency X 1 is a unison which harmonizes with itself. Even harmonics start with 2X, and continue 4X, 6X 8X 10X etc. So saw waves are made up of all harmonics, with decreasing amplitude of 1/harmonic. Square waves are made of odds 1,3,5,7,9,11 etc. same rule and triangles are the same with decreasing amplitude of 1 over the harmonic to the power, and reversing phase at each harmonic. The idea that some people are still talking about partials , so the 1st partial is a fraction of the whole, or the first overtone is higher than the fundamental so it equals 2X the fundamental just confuses everything. It is the same ridiculousness that surounds the idea that normal scales are made up of 8 tones, while chromatic scales are made up of 12. DEFINITELY NOT SO. Count the tones. There are 13 chromatic tones if You include the start and end of the scale in a chromatic scale from C to shining C , and if we were using the idea of twelve separate tones making a chromatic scale, then there would only be 7 scale tones in a standard major or minor scale ... please count them : C,D,E,F,G,A,B. Math for music only works if we are consistent with the definitions of what the numbers represent.

@ucanihl 3 года назад

2:28 well it exists in ourselves. Tinnitus is a pure sine tone most of the time :D And a good whistle is almost a pure sine wave too.

@InventorZahran 4 месяца назад

Some types of organ pipes are designed to produce a sound with as few partials as possible, resulting in an almost sine-like tone.

@ChasMusic 2 года назад

Thank you very much for this. When listening to my random playlist, including songs I've only heard once and thus are not familiar with them, I can often identify what group is singing them, sometimes even from the sound of the intro, even though they play wide varieties of songs. I couldn't identify why I had such luck identifying them. I think your video has the answer: the timbre of their instruments and their voices makes them recognizable.

@maxheadrom3088 Год назад

More cow bell and more mini Moog!!!! And more videos like this! Excellent and easy to understand - not an etasy feat, btw.

@ChrisLeeW00 3 года назад

Timbre is like...a mood. But seriously, I have played around with the idea of defining timbre discreetly, using the format of additive synthesis of sine waves, as well as changes in volume over time of the fundamental/harmonics.

@Pandangus 3 года назад

You're gonna go far kid!

@SirNotAppearing 2 года назад

that insert callback @5:27 is really clever. well done.

@phoebe4567 Год назад

great video!

@nosson77 2 года назад

The difference between timbre and pitch is not one is more real than the other. The difference is that pitch has more variables. You would have a similar problem if I said change the colour. There are three variables to change. Without saying which ones to change or for that matter how much to change you will have an ambiguity in your communication. The difference is with colors and timbre is that with colors many people know how to use a computer to get a pretty accurate color specification. Where as with timbre how many people know how to use a synthesiser to get the sound they want. And we don't have a standardised system to map those parameters with numbers so that we two people can plug in the same numbers and get the same sounds. But it is theoretically possible for humans to set up such a system.

@CharlesFerraro 2 года назад

Additive synthesis is a standard system that can make any timbre.

@xaisthoj 2 года назад

What about Fourier series to represent the partial frequencies.

@TheNormalUniverse 3 года назад

1 minute in but I really appreciate that you put words to this nebulous problem that I've bean unable to describe

@LeonoraTindall 3 года назад

So good! I'm glad I found this channel when I did, I was thinking I'd have to wait a long time before the next video :)

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

Thanks Leonora! If all goes according to plan I’ll post a new vid every second Wednesday:)

@billyli7053 2 года назад

OMG! I have been working on Audio Machine Learning for 5 years so far, and this video still teaches me a lot!

@lydiasteinebendiksen4269 3 года назад

If a tree falls in the woods and sounds like a clarinette playing a just intonated wholetone scale, but nobody's there to hear it, did it sound like a clarinette playing a just intonated wholetone scale?

@TheGrahamBrechin 3 года назад

Thank you for taking the time to explain things in this level of detail ....

@ironslic3 2 года назад

Really enjoy your videos and the layout. All the best 🖤

@miguelcarrillo4702 3 года назад

I came to this video all smug thinking i have a peefect definitions, but your are correct, definitely memory is very important

@James-io8lj Год назад

Timbre is the odd sock drawer. For that reason i gave up trying to define it but you did a good job

@edgarmatias 2 года назад

Phenomenal video. Thank you for your work.

@gjtube37 2 года назад

What a great lesson! Thank you very much!

@tiago0o0o0o0o0o 3 года назад

I've never tought about that before. Awesome video!

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

Cool! Thanks so much ☺️

@navneet4489 2 года назад

Years back i read a book "Phcycology of a musical talent..." an only amazing reaserch of its kind...while watching this video i remember about it, the way it talked about timber and sound imagery...go for it .

@jeffreymixonlowe 4 месяца назад

*Enter Neil Degrasse Tyson* In the context of transgender individuals, timbre can be particularly relevant when discussing voice. Many transgender people work on their voice to align more closely with their gender identity, as the voice can be a significant gender cue. Changing the voice’s timbre can help in being perceived as more masculine, feminine, or androgynous, depending on the individual’s goals.

@MusicByRyder 3 года назад

Well researched and very informative. Great video!

@luizmenezes9971 2 месяца назад

Perhaps a wavelet transform works closer to our ear than fft

@peterhajba514 3 года назад

Could Formants be considered an important part of understanding and recognizing Timbre? Our brains are quite sensitive to formants - this is how we recognize vowels in speech, and also the voice of one person from another. Woodwinds like oboe and clarinet also have prominent formant frequencies - they are not present only in speech. Guitar amp cabinets, even car engines through the exhaust, have their own formants. Or timbre, if you will.

@tiwatay 3 года назад

About your last point and how being able to fully explain timbre to have a sufficient understanding of it, don't you think that complete explanation might be important from a technical side e.g: I imaging having that full understanding would allow us to synthesize any instrument/voice sound.

@ChrisLeeW00 3 года назад

That's gonna be the next big breakthrough in understanding audio.

@pazrage2406 Год назад

Paradox of sounds all become one.

@schwing69 3 года назад

Great video it presented a lot of information very clearly and helped me define what I think timbre actually is! I personally would draw the line of what timbre is a little differently by saying that it only includes the objective elements of a sound before it gets in a brain, and that what goes on after that are mental processes unrelated to timbre. Like when you say the timbre literally changed after you got ear training, I don't think it did, I think the timbre stayed the same but it was your experience of the sound that changed.

@jantuitman 3 года назад

I thought.... but perhaps I am wrong... that partials are not entirely subjective and made up by the FFT algorithm. I mean that they are stronger at 1x, 2x, 3x, ... the base frequency, than say at 1.15 times the base frequency must have some physical explanation in how waves moves in strings and how the air behaves in a tube (for wind instruments). Yet your video makes it sound like that part is just because the FFT algorithm likes to describe it in multiples. Indeed the FFT algorithm likes to use prime numbers, but isn’t it the case also that instrument physics is also a reason why the frequencies of partials are usually an integer factor with respect to the base frequency?

@CharlesFerraro 2 года назад

Yes. A steady excitation source will create harmonics at whole number ratios. Those harmonics are determined by the shape of vibration. That shape can be understood as literally the physical sum of sine wave partials. That is, physically if you could sum sines in the air in exactly the way you need to, you will create the timbre of any object that vibrates in the same fashion.

@Bigtooly 3 года назад

i listened to a few multi-tracks recently, its a game changer, though it was a bootleg and i wasnt sure if it was ripped somehow, but i really enjoyed identifing the layers of the multitrack (ie something like dolby atmos) basically i think if more multi-track songs become available it could help with timbre a bit, since lossy music seems to just muddle sound together.

@SynthieFlowers 3 года назад

Love your videos! Keep it up!

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

Thanks so much William! :)

@malice__doll 3 года назад

this videos are soo good !

@mossgirl2252 3 года назад

I have a degree in music and I learned more about timber in 9 minutes then I did in four years.

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

hahaha it's very widely misunderstood! glad you got something out of it! :)

@thelaboratoryofspacerecord5239 3 года назад

Great video!

@danwylie-sears1134 2 года назад

"... the Fourier transform, or FFT ..." Hey, you left out the "fast" in the spelled-out words, while putting in both "F"s in the abbreviation. In other words, have some "engagement", so that hopefully TPTB will show your video to more people.

@HaharuRecords 2 года назад

Some say that everything exists only in our brain... but i think its sot the fact to that

@pazrage2406 Год назад

So timbre Is a bisexual sound

@stefans.2317 3 года назад

0:19 I thought you were gonna say "crank that soulja boy" for a second lol. Good video!

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

Lmao thanks! Crank him 6 dB tho definitely what he was getting at

@gtric1466 3 года назад

Wow, That was in excellent explanation, as deep as it is. makes so much sense on what we perceive to hear. i believe my brain, i guess not my ears have become more educated in good sound over the years as my hearing has actually diminished. i really cant hear over 14K but yet feel i am losing nothing in the music spectrum. Does Timbre in some way also have to do with 2nd Harmonics? I've learned changing 1 freq. on my EQ. will change the sound of several freqs.

@CharlesFerraro 2 года назад

What do you mean by 2nd Harmonics? If by 2nd harmonic you mean the first overtone then yes… that has to do with timbre. Not sure if 2nd Harmonics is a term I’m not familiar with though. Changing one frequency on an EQ can change several frequencies because the quality curve can never really reach infinity. A Q of 10 and above should be able to isolate a particular harmonic reasonably well. Note that the feedback of boosting a signal can change the time response of a signal. Changing the envelope of a sound can be considered a timbral change.

@boimesa8190 3 года назад

Yo I'm alllll here for this!!!

@birdboat5647 3 года назад

surely this is related to acoustic impedance?

@fartgoon4208 3 года назад

I didn't even know that's how you pronounce timbre

@lassel1644 3 года назад

I´m sorry! Spot on !

@hellasexaroni 3 года назад

man what the fuck my mind is blown

@federicoprimavera1171 3 года назад

Amazing videos! Keep going on! Just noticed an issue... pay attention to a/v sync, your voice is often out of sync

@SoundsGoodChannel 3 года назад

thanks for the feedback! i'll be clearing that issue up on the next one. my setup is very low-tech and sometimes does weird stuff like that.

@pazrage2406 Год назад

Addicted to pain ..doeesent all seem to be a a Paradox..

@incertaesedis6966 3 года назад

6:54 indeed♡

@ElecDashTronDotOrg 3 года назад

Suuuper thankyou!

@WillSmith-qc7qh 3 года назад

Oh wow. There's a lot to unpack here. We understand timbre and what makes it, very well. Check out the Wikipedia article some time. It's not small. Also, the bit about 'spectrum'. I don't quite understand what you mean when you use that word. We use it to represent a range of things. ie the human hearing spectrum is 20Hz-20kHz. Also, what you're hearing never changes if the source is the same. You may experience it differently, but it's the same sound. There's a few other things you say that are kind of odd, and you seem to have your own definitions for some technical terms. Where was your degree from?

@ElecDashTronDotOrg 3 года назад

@@WillSmith-qc7qh Where did YOU get YOUR degree from? The explanantion of spectrum in reference to the topic here is perfectly well explained, go read up on Wikipedia what spectrum means in this circumstance. You seem bitter mate

@pazrage2406 Год назад

So if its familiarity that means there certain addiction to It that body like even thought the Matute mind doeesent.