All musical instruments produce notes (tones) that contain harmonics (pure notes that sound all by themselves). This is a side track but btw, there is no such thing as one single note. Instead of hearing a chord, if it is simple enough (i.e., sonorous) your mind wants to simplify it to a single 'root' note (with a pleasant tonal color).

The 'perceived tone' in my above definition would actually be the root fundamental harmonic of the entire collection of pitches sounding together. 'The psycho-acoustic perception of a collection of 2 or more individual tones (frequencies or pitches) sounding together, with all pitches having only simple harmonic relationships (ratios) with each other, the result of which mimics the sound of a single fundamental pitch sounding alone' What kind of music and style are you trying to describe?įor instance, the term 'mode' means one thing to a jazz musician, but to a scholar of medieval and renaissance music it would mean something completely different! ( painful personal experience taught me that lesson -)īeing a composer, my kind of mathematical base definition of 'sonority' would be: If your are looking for the definition of a term, you need to first think about context. (and so the musical definitions get fragmented even farther) These visions sometimes play out together as pedagogic feuds, (that is a good thing -) but most of the time everyone keeps to their comfortable inner circles. Each department has a different artistic vision. Conservatories are divided with strong partitions (ivory towers) between their departments. Unfortunately, the word 'sonority' (like many musical terms) developed a lot of artistic baggage as it was used to describe similar (but different) things during the evolution of western music. From the concepts below I have tried to illustrate interesting insights about the 'multi colored' nature of this term and hence give a better understanding of what it may mean in different contexts.

Unfortunately this is not a specific answer. I think of those as special cases of the more generic 'sonority.' Of course, new music has its own references such as 'cluster' (simultaneous adjacent tones) and 'cloud' (non-simultaneous aperiodic textures made up of a multiplicity of unrelated tones). This, even when the notes are equally-tempered, but more so as non-harmonic overtones and tunings come into play (as in soundmass, Klangtone, and outright non-harmonic sounds like bells). But as chords become more complex - for example bitonality such as one might hear from Stravinsky, or the use of even higher overtones to create eleventh and thirteenth chords - they tend to switch to the word 'sonority.' My inference from their usage is that the 'sound' of the vertical simultaneity stops having the implications of functional harmony, wherein each note in the chord has tendencies to lead to adjacent diatonic notes, and becomes instead more of a timbral appeal. I generally hear composers and theorists use traditional terms like 'chord' when discussing triads, seventh chords, ninth chords - harmonic structures built on thirds - and their inversions.

Sonority definition music