Za pravilno razumijevanje principa sinteze zvuka potrebno je u kratkim crtama ponoviti osnove akustike. Ljudsko uho razlikuje zvukove po svojoj glasnoci, visini i boji. Navedene subjektivne karakteristike slusnog osjeta imaju svoj fizikalni smisao: glasnoca zvuka (eng. volume) je amplituda, visina zvuka (eng. pitch) je frekvencija osnovnog tona zvuka (zvuk rastavljen po Fourieru se sastoji od osnovnog tona i visih harmonika), a boja zvuka (eng. timbre) je odredjena brojem visih harmonika i njihovim jakostima. Boja zvuka je odlucujuca za prepoznavanje glazbenih instrumenata. Dakle, boja zvuka ovisi o amplitudnom spektru zvuka, a ne ovisi o faznom odnosu izmedju pojedinih komponenata spektra.



One of the basic elements of music is called color, or timbre (pronounced "TAM-ber"). Color includes all the aspects of a sound that do not have anything to do with how high or low it is, how loud or soft, or how long or short. In other words, if a flute plays a note, and then an oboe plays the same note, for the same length of time, at the same loudness, you can still easily tell the two notes apart, because a flute sounds different from an oboe. This difference is the color of the sound.


Timbre is caused by the fact that each note from a musical instrument is made up of more than one sound wave. These sets of sound waves, called harmonics, are basically the same for every instrument. Small differences in the balance of these waves - how many you can hear, and how loud they are compared to each other - create the many different musical colors. The harmonics at the beginning of each note - the attack - are especially important for timbre, so it is actually easier to identify instruments that are playing short notes with strong articulations than it is to identify instruments playing long, smooth notes.


In music, timbre, also timber (French, IPA /'tæmbər/ as in the first two syllables of tambourine), is the quality of a musical note or sound which distinguishes different types of sound production or musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound which are used in the determination of timbre are spectrum and envelope; psychoacoustics or human perception describe the perceived quality of a sound as the "sound color".

For example, timbre is what, with a little practice, people use to recognise the saxophone from the trumpet in a jazz group, even if they are playing notes at the same pitch and amplitude. Timbre has been called the psychoacoustician's waste-basket as it can denote many apparently unrelated aspects of a sound.

low-down: deeply emotional <low-down blues>