Timbre

In music, timbre, also timber, is the quality of a musical note or sound that distinguishes dissimilar types of sound production or musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate the observation of timbre include spectrum and envelope. Timbre is also known in psychoacoustics as sound quality or sound 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 they are playing notes at the same pitch and amplitude. Timbre has been called the psycho acoustician’s multidimensional wastebasket category as it can denote many apparently dissimilar aspects of a sound.

Tone color is also often used as a synonym. People who experience synesthesia may see certain colors when they hear particular instruments. Helmholtz used the German Klangfarbe and Tyndall proposed its English translation, clangtint. But both terms were disapproved of by Alexander Ellis who also discredits register and color for their pre-existing English meanings.