tone color

American  

noun

Music.

1. tone quality; timbre.

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Etymology

Origin of tone color

First recorded in 1880–85

Example Sentences

She is a soprano who employs little vibrato, has a huge supply of tone color and a taut delivery that makes every word not only intelligible but indispensable.

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 14, 2020

But in this new study that we’ve done, we looked at cases where people were using a skin tone color for their emoji that didn’t match their actual skin color.

From The Verge • Dec. 12, 2018

As a fiddler, though, to reach the top, she will need to cultivate a much wider range of tone color, particularly in slow, lyrical sections; the sound was too often dry or pinched.

From Washington Post • May 8, 2016

Much of that has to do with her unerring ear for tone color and the ever-changing timbres she creates, which pull the listener along as surely as a traditional harmonic progression.

From New York Times • Mar. 6, 2015

Each voice has a unique tone color that is described using adjectives or metaphors such as “nasally,” “resonant,” “vibrant,” “strident,” “high,” “low,” “breathy,” “piercing,” “ringing,” “rounded,” “warm,” “mellow,” “dark,” “bright,” “heavy,” “light,” “vibrato.”

From "Music and the Child" by Natalie Sarrazin

Related Words

• timbre