Tone colour
Characteristic tonal quality.
What it means
Tone colour (German Klangfarbe) is that property of a sound by which one recognizes the producing instrument or voice — what distinguishes an A on the violin from an A on the clarinet, although pitch and volume are the same. It is the most multi-layered of the sound properties and cannot be reduced to a single number.
Musical use
Its most important basis is the composition of the partials. A vibrating body vibrates at the same time in parts, and which of these partials stand out how strongly determines the character: sounds with many high partials seem bright and cutting, those with few soft and round. To this is added the course in time — the attack transient is even more decisive for recognizability than the standing spectrum.
Within one instrument the tone colour changes with the register: the low register of the clarinet sounds different from its high one, the G string of the violin different from the E string. Composers use this deliberately and choose not only the instrument but also the register according to the desired sound. In orchestration the mixture is added: two instruments led together yield a new colour that neither produces alone.
In the twentieth century, tone colour rose from an accompanying property to a shaping parameter that stands alongside pitch and rhythm and forms courses of its own.
Other names
In French, tone colour is called timbre, an older French circumlocution is couleur. Physically it rests on the distribution of the partials and the attack transient. English sound, in jazz and popular music, designates the typical overall sound of a musician or a band, that is, tone colour in the extended sense.
Performance practice
Regard tone colour as a means of shaping, not as a fixed property of your instrument: point of contact, bow speed, blowing angle, manner of touch change it considerably. For a passage, deliberately try two different colours and decide. In the ensemble, listen to the mixture — equal volume does not yet yield a shared colour, and matching attack and vibrato bring more than any dynamic marking.