Violins and viola make blue, if they're playing softly it makes a light blue. Think of sonority as how the colours on a colour wheel blend to make new colours, and colour as the shade of the colour. you can play sul tasto, ponticello, all legato or detache. Sonority is describing the sound of a group of instruments playing together - the unique sound of trumpets and trombones playing compared to the sound of just trumpets or trumpets and tuba.Ĭolour describes the sound produced by the player - think of the different sounds you can produce on the viola. I think the difference is in what they are describing. They can be used as synonyms, precisely they all refer to "the quality of the sound we are hearing." As such, when we say "that's an interesting color" or "that's an interesting texture," we understand what we mean because we then listen to the thing and say "oh yeah, I hear that interesting thing they were talking about, whatever that is must ve what they meant by 'color'/'texture'/'whatever'" That's hearing it as a timbre.Ĥ) Color can be used to mean just about whatever you want it to mean.īut these things have overlapping boundaries. As a simple example of this last bit, if a violin and a clarinet play the exact same line together, you may hear it as neither a violin, nor a clarinet, but some weird (or artistic) single new timbre that sounds a bit like both instruments. This doesn't necessarily mean it is one thing, it's just heard as if it was. A flute's timbre is basically "the thing that I hear when I hear something as a flute, the thing that let's me know I'm not hearing a piano, or a violin, etc." The thing about timbre, and what's slightly different about it compared to sonority pr texture, is that it tends to be heard as a single thing. Thus, I can speak of a "perfect fifth sonority," which means "there are two voices sounding at the same time that are a perfect fifth away from each other." You can see how this is somewhat related to "timbre" and "color" in that it's referring to a "quality of sound," it's just that we have more specific technical terms for this aspect of sound quality.ģ.) Timbre can often be used to describe the sound quality of a specific instrument, or a specific effect produced by that instrument. These are descriptions of how many musical things are there in a musical event and what are they doing in relation to one another.Ģ.) Sonority, while it can be used interchangeably with color and timbre, has a third meaning that is roughly analogous to interval or chord quality.
![sonority definition music sonority definition music](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fJXtKMwR6zE/Ud2PejtpgnI/AAAAAAAAAPM/P1-lmQbpbT4/s1600/sempre+ped+Beethoven+Appassionata.jpg)
Sonority definition music plus#
Thus, when 4 people are singing different musical lines together, we call that a "4 part texture." Or when you have melody plus an accompaniment of chords, we call that a "homophonic texture." If there is a lot of independence among the parts, where each line feels equally important and no one feels like it's the main one, we might call it a "polyphonic" or "contrapuntal" texture. Texture can, but not always, refer to some sort of technical fact about the construction of the music. A lot of people will use "color" to mean "timbre" and "sonority." But let me provide some distinction.
![sonority definition music sonority definition music](https://etudemagazine.com/etude/1920/09/quef-01.jpg)
I think, in truth, that a lot of these terms can be used interchangeably.