*** Welcome to piglix ***

Musical tone


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

A pure tone is a tone with a sinusoidal waveform, e.g. a sine or cosine wave. This means that regardless of other characteristic properties such as amplitude or phase, the wave consists of a single frequency. Sine and cosine waves are the most basic building blocks of more complex waves, and as additional frequencies (i.e. additional sine and cosine waves having different frequencies) are combined, the waveform transforms from a sinusoidal into a more complex shape.

A sine wave is characterized by its frequency, the number of cycles per second—or its wavelength, the distance the waveform travels through its medium within a period—and the amplitude, the size of each cycle. A pure tone has the unique property that its waveshape and sound are changed only in amplitude and phase by linear acoustic systems.


...
Wikipedia

...