Author: Eoin
Date: 2001-04-22 22:09
Shelly, you say that if two different clarinets play the same note, B for example, they should both sound the same, because if one is very different from the other, it is not a B anymore. You are confusing the pitch with the timbre, also called tone quality.
Sound is a vibration of the air. The pitch of the sound is the frequency of the vibration, that is, the number of vibrations per second. The timbre or tone quality is the shape of the vibration. Vibrations are not pure sine waves, they can be square, triangular or all sorts of other shapes. Different clarinets will have different shaped vibrations and so will sound different even when they are playing the same note.
In general in orchestras, there is a preferred sound for the clarinets. A new player will be encouraged to cultivate this particular sound to blend with the other clarinets. There is a German Sound, a French sound and so on. These distinctive sounds are best understood by listening to the orchestras, as descriptive terms can be very confusing. One person's "bright" can be another person's "dark".
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The Clarinet BBoard
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