Timbre

In music, timbre (/ˈtæmbər/ TAM-bər (American English), /ˈtæɪmbər/ TAIM-bər (British English), or /ˈtɪmbər/) also known as tone color or tone quality from psychoacoustics, is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope.
In simple terms, timbre is what makes a particular musical sound different from another, even when they have the same pitch and loudness. For instance, it is the difference between a guitar and a piano playing the same note at the same loudness. Experienced musicians are able to distinguish between different instruments based on their varied timbres, even if those instruments are playing notes at the same pitch and loudness.

Tone quality and color are synonyms for timbre, as well as the "texture attributed to a single instrument". Hermann von Helmholtz used the German Klangfarbe (tone color), and John Tyndall proposed an English translation, clangtint. But both terms were disapproved of by Alexander Ellis, who also discredits register and color for their pre-existing English meanings (Erickson 1975, 7).
The sound of a musical instrument may be described with such words as bright, dark, warm, harsh, and other terms. There are also colors of noise, such as pink and white.
In visual representations of sound, timbre corresponds to the shape of the image (Abbado 1988, 3).

Melody

A melody (from Greek μελῳδία, melōidía, "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of pitch and rhythm, while more figuratively, the term can include successions of other musical elements such as tonal color. It may be considered the foreground to the background accompaniment. A line or part need not be a foreground melody.
Melodies often consist of one or more musical phrases or motifs, and are usually repeated throughout a song or piece in various forms. Melodies may also be described by their melodic motion or the pitches or the intervals between pitches (predominantly conjunct or disjunct or with further restrictions), pitch range, tension and release, continuity and coherence, cadence, and shape.

Element

Given the many and varied elements and styles of melody "many extant explanations [of melody] confine us to specific stylistic models, and they are too exclusive." Paul Narveson claimed in 1984 that more than three-quarters of melodic topics had not been explored thoroughly.
The melodies existing in most European music written before the 20th century, and popular music throughout the 20th century, featured "fixed and easily discernible frequency patterns", recurring "events, often periodic, at all structural levels" and "recurrence of durations and patterns of durations".
Melodies in the 20th century "utilized a greater variety of pitch resources than ha[d] been the custom in any other historical period of Western music." While the diatonic scale was still used, the chromatic scale became "widely employed." Composers also allotted a structural role to "the qualitative dimensions" that previously had been "almost exclusively reserved for pitch and rhythm". Kliewer states, "The essential elements of any melody are duration, pitch, and quality (timbre), texture, and loudness. Though the same melody may be recognizable when played with a wide variety of timbres and dynamics, the latter may still be an "element of linear ordering"

Chords

A chord in music is any harmonic set of three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously.These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords. Chords and sequences of chords are frequently used in modern Western, West African and Oceanian music, whereas they are absent from the music of many other parts of the world.
The most frequently encountered chords are triads, so called because they consist of three distinct notes: further notes may be added to give seventh chords, extended chords, or added tone chords. The most common chords are the major and minor triads and then the augmented and diminished triads. The descriptions "major", "minor", "augmented" and "diminished" are sometimes referred to collectively as chordal "quality". Chords are also commonly classed by their root note so, for instance, the chord C Major may be described as a triad of major quality built upon the note C. Chords may also be classified by inversion, the order in which their notes are stacked.
However, since the structural meaning of a chord depends exclusively upon the degree of the scale on which it is built, chords are usually analysed by numbering them, using Roman numerals, upwards from the key-note (See diatonic function). Common ways of notating or representing chords in western music other than conventional staff notation include Roman numerals, figured bass (much used in the Baroque era), macro symbols (sometimes used in modern musicology), and various systems of symbols and notations such as are typically found in the lead sheets, fake books and chord charts used in popular music to lay out the harmonic groundplan of a piece so that the musician may improvise, "jam", "vamp", "busk" or "head arrange" a part.

Rhythm

Rhythm

Rhythm is the arrangement of sounds and silences in time. Meter animates time in regular pulse groupings, called measures or bars. The time signature or meter signature specifies how many beats are in a measure, and which value of written note is counted and felt as a single beat. Through increased stress and attack (and subtle variations in duration), particular tones may be accented. There are conventions in most musical traditions for a regular and hierarchical accentuation of beats to reinforce the meter. Syncopated rhythms are rhythms that accent unexpected parts of the beat. Playing simultaneous rhythms in more than one time signature is called polymeter. See also polyrhythm.
In recent years, rhythm and meter have become an important area of research among music scholars. Recent work in these areas includes books by Bengt-Olov Palmqvist, Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, and Jonathan Krame

Fundamentals of music(pitch)

Pitch

Pitch is a subjective sensation, reflecting generally the lowness (slower wave frequency) or highness (faster wave frequency) of a sound. Most people appear to possess relative pitch, which means they perceive each note relative to some reference pitch, or as some interval from the previous pitch. Significantly fewer people demonstrate absolute pitch (or perfect pitch), the ability to identify certain pitches without comparison to another pitch. Human perception of pitch can be comprehensively fooled to create auditory illusions. Despite these perceptual oddities, perceived pitch is nearly always closely connected with the fundamental frequency of a note, with a lesser connection to sound pressure level, harmonic content (complexity) of the sound, and to the immediately preceding history of notes heard. In general, the higher the frequency of vibration, the higher the perceived pitch is, and lower the frequency, the lower the pitch. However, even for tones of equal intensity, perceived pitch and measured frequency do not stand in a simple linear relationship.
Below about 1,000 Hz, the perceived loudness of a tone gets lower as sound frequency decreases. Also above approximately 2,000 Hz, the perceived loudness increases as the sound's frequency increases. This is due to the ear's natural sensitivity to higher pitched sound, as well as the ear's particular sensitivity to sound around the 200–400 Hz area, the frequency range most of the human voice occupies.
In Western music, there have long been several competing pitch standards defining tuning systems. Most made a particular key sonorous, with increasingly remote ones more and more problematic; the underlying problem is related to the physics of vibrations.
In addition, fixing notes to standard frequencies (required for instrument makers) has varied as well. Concert A was set at 435 Hz by France in 1859 while in England, concert A varied between 439 and 452 Hz. A frequency of 440 Hz was recommended as the standard in 1939, and in 1955 the International Organization for Standardization affirmed the choice. A440 is now widely, though not exclusively, used as the A above middle C.
The difference in frequency between two pitches is called an interval. The most basic interval is the unison, which is simply two of the same pitch, followed by the slightly more complex octave, which indicates either a doubling or halving of the fundamental frequency.