Timbre

At first glance, the word timbre looks like a word Paul Bunyan the lumberjack might have shouted as he plunged through the forests of Minnesota, swinging his ax. "TIMBRE!" he shouted, misspelling all the way to Canada......

But timbre isn't really a lumberjack word at all. Every song leader, of course (of course, right?) knows this is a musical word. Orchestra conductors, as well, enjoy the realities of timbre.

This is a fancy word. Fancy words don't sound like what they look like. Timbre is "tawmber" (the w is not emphasized).

Here are what some fancy books have to say about timbre:

"No-one is quite sure what timbre is."

(The Music Instinct- How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It by Philip Ball).

Thankfully, the same author goes on to quote someone a little more knowledgeable -

"We do not know how to define timbre, but it is not loudness, and it is not pitch." (Albert Bregman).

If it stopped there, we would have no hope for timbre. But Philip Ball gives us a better idea of timbre a few pages later:

"......musical instruments create complex tones that contain overtones of the fundamental pitch with whole-number multiples of its frequency, arrayed in the harmonic series. The acoustic strength of an overtone - how loudly it sounds in the mix - varies from one kind of instrument to another. These differences account for a substantial part of the timbral distinctions."