# Question for people who can sing really well

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-for-people-who-can-sing-really-well/349587>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [March 23, 2006, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-for-people-who-can-sing-really-well/349587 "2006-03-23T14:32:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 3

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Dunderman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dunderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunderman)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2006, 8:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-for-people-who-can-sing-really-well/349587/41 "2006-03-25T08:20:39Z")

</div>

I’ve had some time to think about this, and a question has arisen: what, technically, is tone colour? I thought there was nothing to sound but frequency and amplitude.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Meleemancer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a183cd/32.png) [@Meleemancer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meleemancer)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2006, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-for-people-who-can-sing-really-well/349587/42 "2006-03-25T18:40:05Z")

</div>

Most analog means of sound production don’t create a perfect sine wave tone; they actually produce a large number of superimposed waves, with imperfections in the reproductions depending on the means of production. Tone colour, or timbre, is the combination of all of these ‘imperfections’. The [Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbre) on timbre has a reasonable summary.

[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-for-people-who-can-sing-really-well/349587.md?page=2)