Timbre has always been thrown around in my music lessons since I was a kid. It seemed to be like a catch-all for anything that couldn’t be described using pitch, rhythm, etc. It somehow meant tone, embouchure, dynamics, resonance, and colour all at once. You just had to guess which one based on context. Everyone loved to use it to elevate their music terminology, but nobody could actually say what it meant. And for a while, I accepted it as another one of life’s great mysteries…

I have always been fascinated by how different musical instruments could elicit different emotions/feelings despite them playing the same notes at the same pitch and intensity, without realizing that this was related to timbre…

I first learned about the word "timbre" in my middle school physics class… listening to more contemporary classical music a few years later, "timbre" attained a more human quality to me, distinct from the other dimensions…