Describing timbre to other people can feel messy and vague. A certain amount of messiness is necessary for something so complex, but there are common concepts, terms, and approaches that can make communication about timbre more effective. We will introduce two important elements that affect how we perceive timbre: how it changes over time, and its component frequencies. We will then share two approaches to descriptive terms.

The first major determinant of timbre is how a sound changes over time, or its “envelope.” For example, if you pluck a guitar string, the sound starts with a sharp, loud noise from that pluck, followed by a much quieter sustained note that slowly becomes quieter until you cannot hear it any more. For many sounds, it is useful to focus on two phases. The first is the “attack,” “onset,” or “articulation.” This is most obvious in instruments with naturally percussive attacks like drums, cymbals, piano, plucked strings, or a singer starting with a consonant. Even wind instruments and bowed strings often have a slight change from their initial sound to what follows. The second phase is the “sustain” or “steady state.” This is a more consistent sound, though it may still change somewhat over time as a performer changes their vibrato or volume or as the instrument naturally becomes quieter over time. If you practiced imitating timbres with your voice, it may be useful to think of your opening consonant (if any) as representing the attack and your choice of vowel as representing the sustain.

The second major determinant of timbre is its pitch components. Even when we think that we are only hearing a single pitch, most constant sounds are made up of more than one pitch or frequency. (For a fuller explanation, see here.) Timbre is strongly affected by which frequencies are present, how loud they are, and how they change over time. This aspect of timbre is often visualized with a graph called a spectogram (explanation; simple visualization).

Describing Timbre 1: General Approaches

Descriptions of timbre often draw from a few categories of words:

• Matter/Material: These descriptions focus on a material that we imagine was involved in making the sound. For example, we might describe a sound as brassy, metallic, or reedy.
• Action: These terms focus instead on an action we might associate with a sound. Sometimes we describe some aspect of the action we imagine a performer is doing to make the sound (e.g., breathy, strained, plucked), and sometimes we describe an action we imagine the sound is doing either to the space around it or to the listener (e.g., piercing, biting).
• Analogies to other senses: These particularly common terms describe sound by analogy to something we understand in another sense like sight or touch. Examples include brilliant, dull, dark, clear, warm, rough, and sweet.
• Onomatopoeia: We sometimes use words that sound like what they mean, such as buzzing, rattling, hissing, or clanging.
• Other analogies: Because timbre is hard to describe, analogies in general can be useful. Common examples include rich, thick, pure, round, deep, and heavy.

Describing Timbre 2: Opposites and Comparisons

Some descriptive words for timbre pair nicely with their opposites. This is particularly helpful because it allows us to compare two sounds and, for example, describe one as “darker” and the other as “brighter.” Sometimes a sound fits clearly with one term rather than another, but how we hear a sound always depends on its context. It is probably more useful to think of these terms not as a binary choice (e.g., “is the sound dark or bright?”) but rather as a spectrum (e.g., “this sound is darker than that sound”), and to recognize that sounds that fall in the middle of the spectrum may be hard to describe.

The list of examples below is drawn primarily from the work of Megan Lavengood (who in turn drew on a book by Robert Cogan), focusing on the terms that we think are most commonly used. Many of the terms have fairly intuitive meanings; we have annotated a few where we think it is helpful. Fuller technical definitions are in Lavengood’s article. Each pair is linked to Lavengood’s audio example, illustrated by a spectrogram.

• Bright/Dark
• Pure/Noisy
• Full/Hollow
• Percussive/Legato: this is primarily influenced by a sound’s attack
• Harmonic/Inharmonic: we can understand this intuitively by how much dissonance or clash there is in a timbre; bells, for example, often have a complex, dissonant, “inharmonic” sound
• Steady/Wavering: Lavengood does not have an audio example but relates this primarily to the presence or absence of vibrato