Timbral words mean different things to different speakers

Evidence

Timbral descriptions also have their place in musician/sound engi­ neer communication, but this is not a trivial task since many of the words employed have different meanings depending on who is using them. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1543

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Echoes the earlier point about how terminology maps between musicians’ pitch talk and engineers’ frequency talk — both passages show the gap between acoustic reality and perceptual language.

Related

• Timbral words shift meaning between different users (similarity 0.94)
• Timbral terminology is ambiguous across different users (similarity 0.87)
• Engineers must speak pitch, not frequency, to communicate with musicians (similarity 0.84)
• Current acoustic models cannot explain how experts distinguish fine timbre differences between instruments (similarity 0.81)
• Timbre is defined as the residual difference once loudness, pitch, and duration are matched (similarity 0.81)
• Timbre is determined by the relative amplitudes of partials, not their frequencies alone (similarity 0.80)
• Timbre is defined negatively, as whatever differs between equal-pitch, equal-loudness sounds (similarity 0.80)
• The English word timbre derives from a contested translation of German klangfarbe. (similarity 0.80)
• Timbre lacks a one-dimensional subjective scale unlike pitch and loudness (similarity 0.80)
• Timbre is judged subjectively with no right answer, unlike pitch or loudness (similarity 0.79)
• Timbre, unlike pitch and loudness, has no objective scale (similarity 0.79)
• Timbre distinguishes sounds sharing pitch, loudness, and duration. (similarity 0.79)
• The word timbre derives from klangfarbe meaning color of tone (similarity 0.79)
• Instruments sharing pitch sound different because waveform shape drives basilar-membrane timbre (similarity 0.79)
• Musicians describe sounds using pitch, loudness, and timbre descriptors (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Current acoustic models cannot explain how experts distinguish fine timbre differences between instruments #complicates (0.85) — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1521