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Listen to recordings of different instruments playing alone or playing very prominently above a group. Some suggestions: an unaccompanied violin or cello sonata, a flute, oboe, trumpet, or horn concerto, native American flute music, classical guitar, bagpipes, steel pan drums, panpipes, or organ. For each instrument, what "color" words would you use to describe the timbre of each instrument? Use as many words as you can that seem appropriate, and try to think of some that aren't listed above. Do any of the instruments actually make you think of specific shades of color, like fire-engine red or sky blue?

Although trained musicians will generally agree that a particular sound is reedy, thin, or full, there are no hard-and-fast right-and-wrong answers to this exercise.

Where do the harmonics, and the timbre, come from? When a string vibrates, the main pitch you hear is from the vibration of the whole string back and forth. That is the fundamental , or first harmonic. But the string also vibrates in halves, in thirds, fourths, and so on. Each of these fractions also produces a harmonic. The string vibrating in halves produces the second harmonic; vibrating in thirds produces the third harmonic, and so on.

This method of naming and numbering harmonics is the most straightforward and least confusing, but there are other ways of naming and numbering harmonics, and this can cause confusion. Some musicians do not consider the fundamental to be a harmonic; it is just the fundamental. In that case, the string halves will give the first harmonic, the string thirds will give the second harmonic and so on. When the fundamental is included in calculations, it is called the first partial , and the rest of the harmonics are the second, third, fourth partials and so on. Also, some musicians use the term overtones as a synonym for harmonics. For others, however, an overtone is any frequency (not necessarily a harmonic) that can be heard resonating with the fundamental. The sound of a gong or cymbals will include overtones that aren't harmonics; that's why the gong's sound doesn't seem to have as definite a pitch as the vibrating string does. If you are uncertain what someone means by the second harmonic or by the term overtones, ask for clarification.

Vibrating string

The fundamental pitch is produced by the whole string vibrating back and forth. But the string is also vibrating in halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, and so on, producing harmonics . All of these vibrations happen at the same time, producing a rich, complex, interesting sound.

A column of air vibrating inside a tube is different from a vibrating string, but the column of air can also vibrate in halves, thirds, fourths, and so on, of the fundamental, so the harmonic series will be the same. So why do different instruments have different timbres? The difference is the relative loudness of all the different harmonics compared to each other. When a clarinet plays a note, perhaps the odd-numbered harmonics are strongest; when a French horn plays the same notes, perhaps the fifth and tenth harmonics are the strongest. This is what you hear that allows you to recognize that it is a clarinet or horn that is playing.

You will find some more extensive information on instruments and harmonics in Standing Waves and Musical Instruments and Standing Waves and Wind Instruments .

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Source:  OpenStax, Frequency and music. OpenStax CNX. Feb 21, 2006 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10338/1.1
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