Sound

What it means

Sound (German Klang) designates the acoustic event as it is perceived. In the more precise usage of acoustics a distinction is made: a tone in the strict sense is a single vibration without admixture; a sound (Klang) consists of a fundamental and its partials and corresponds to what instruments actually produce; a noise rests on irregular vibration without determinable pitch. In everyday musical usage the words Ton and Klang are used less sharply; “Klang” there often also designates the sounding together of several notes or the overall tonal effect of an instrument or ensemble.

Musical use

Four properties make up a sound: pitch, duration, volume, and tone colour. Tone colour arises from the composition of the partials and is what an instrument is recognized by. To this is added the course in time — attack, sustain, decay. The attack in particular contributes more to recognizability than one would suppose: if one cuts away the beginning of a piano or flute note, the instrument becomes hard to identify.

For music-making it follows that the sound does not depend on pitch alone but equally on the manner of attack, on the register, on the dynamics, and on the room. The same note can sound hard or soft, thin or sustaining, without anything changing in its frequency.

In acoustics a Klang is a composite sound event of fundamental and overtones, in contrast to the pure sine tone and to noise with an irregular spectrum. In general usage, by contrast, Klang means the overall impression of an instrument or ensemble. In Hugo Riemann's functional theory, Klang designates a triad as a unit, for instance a major or minor sonority.

Performance practice

Work on the attack if your tone does not carry — the beginning of a note decides its character more than the course. When practising, listen deliberately to the tone colour and not only to notes and rhythm; record yourself occasionally for this. And watch the decay: how a note ends belongs to the shaping just as much as its beginning.