5 ms·
Pitch is the frequency of the oscillation, timbre is the internal structure of what's oscillating. Is that right at all?
by andoando 3y ago
Pitch is the frequency of the oscillation, timbre is the internal structure of what's oscillating. Is that right at all?
- hydrogen7800 3y ago"Everything is overtones", or so I've heard somewhere. The pitch, or note you hear from an instrument is the fundamental frequency, and the combination of overtones determines the timbre. These overtones are other sine waves at different amplitudes and frequencies, and the combination of these are instrument dependent. Additive synthesizers do this to approximate "real" instruments.
- taco_emoji 3y agoIt's also the shape of the wave. Sawtooth waves are buzzier or "brighter" than sine waves, for example.
- andoando 3y agoAnd the shape of the wave is just a composition of more waves :->
- hydrogen7800 3y agoThis is a great visualization of fourier series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r18Gi8lSkfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r18Gi8lSkfM
- andoando 3y agoMan I wish my full time job was studying math.
- analog31 3y agoFor periodic signals the waveform and the overtone series precisely determine one another.
- mrob 3y agoAnd the human ear is mostly insensitive to phase of those overtones, so you can have waves with visually very different waveform that sound identical.
- relaxing 3y agoThe combination of overtones, but also the change in volume of those overtones over time.
- scns 3y agoA thousand times this.
- ta2112 3y agoYes, that sounds mostly right to my understanding. Exploring the space of that internal structure is the point of the article. Both pitch and timbre get remarkably complicated the more they're looked in to.
- esafak 3y agoTimbre is the quality that's left after you factor out the pitch and intensity. How it "sounds".