Traditionally in Western music, a musical tone is a steady periodic sound. A musical tone is characterized by its duration, pitch, intensity (or

loudness In acoustics, loudness is the subjective perception of sound pressure. More formally, it is defined as, "That attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which sounds can be ordered on a scale extending from quiet to loud". The relation of ph ...

), and timbre (or quality). The notes used in

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...

can be more complex than musical tones, as they may include aperiodic aspects, such as attack

transients Transience or transient may refer to: Music * ''Transient'' (album), a 2004 album by Gaelle * ''Transience'' (Steven Wilson album), 2015 * Transience (Wreckless Eric album) Science and engineering * Transient state, when a process variable or ...

, vibrato, and envelope modulation. A simple tone, or pure tone, has a

sinusoidal A sine wave, sinusoidal wave, or just sinusoid is a mathematical curve defined in terms of the '' sine'' trigonometric function, of which it is the graph. It is a type of continuous wave and also a smooth periodic function. It occurs often i ...

waveform In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its graph as a function of time, independent of its time and magnitude scales and of any displacement in time.David Crecraft, David Gorham, ''Electro ...

. A complex tone is a combination of two or more pure tones that have a periodic pattern of repetition, unless specified otherwise. The

Fourier theorem A Fourier series () is a summation of harmonically related sinusoidal functions, also known as components or harmonics. The result of the summation is a periodic function whose functional form is determined by the choices of cycle length (or ''p ...

states that any periodic waveform can be approximated as closely as desired as the sum of a series of sine waves with frequencies in a harmonic series and at specific phase relationships to each other. The common denominator frequency, which is also often the lowest of these frequencies is the

fundamental frequency The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the ''fundamental'', is defined as the lowest frequency of a periodic waveform. In music, the fundamental is the musical pitch of a note that is perceived as the lowest partial present. I ...

, and is also the inverse of the period of the waveform. The fundamental frequency determines the pitch of the tone, which is perceived by the human hearing. In music, notes are assigned to tones with different fundamental frequencies, in order to describe the pitch of played tones.

History

Tones were recognised by Greek philosopher Aristoxenus (375-335 BCE), who called them "tensions". tonografia1841, p. 37

References

Citations Works cited *

External links

Pure tones & complex sounds
Hearing Music theory Musical notation Pitch (music) Sounds by type Tone, EQ and filter Waves {{music-theory-stub

History

See also

References

External links