In music, timbre (pronounced /ˈtæmbər/, like tamber, or spelling pronunciation /ˈtɪmbər/; French: [tɛ̃bʁ]) is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices or musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. Timbre is also known in psychoacoustics as tone quality or tone color.
For example, timbre is what, with a little practice, people use to distinguish the saxophone from the trumpet in a jazz group, even if both instruments are playing notes at the same pitch and loudness. Timbre has been called a "wastebasket" attribute[1] or category,[2] or "the psychoacoustician's multidimensional wastebasket category for everything that cannot be qualified as pitch or loudness."[3]
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