Musical tone
A musical tone is a steady periodic sound. A musical tone is characterized by its duration, pitch, intensity (or loudness), and timbre (or quality).[1] The notes used in music can be more complex than musical tones, as they may include aperiodic aspects, such as attack transients, vibrato, and envelope modulation.
A simple tone, or pure tone, has a sinusoidal waveform. A complex tone is any musical tone that is not sinusoidal, but is periodic, such that it can be described as a sum of simple tones with harmonically related frequencies.[2]
See also
- Signal tone
- Mathematics of musical scales
References
- ↑ Juan G. Roederer (2008). The Physics and Psychophysics of Music: An Introduction (fourth ed.). Springer. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-387-09470-0.
- ↑ Hermann von Helmholtz and Alexander John Ellis (1885). On the sensations of tone as a physiological basis for the theory of music (second ed.). Longmans, Green. p. 23.