At some point Mahgister will learn or realize what he calls "timbre" is really just frequency response, though he will scream otherwise.First- at some point audio2design will understand that the timbre concept being a complex one cannot be understood FROM only one field but by many at the same times... And most importantly cannot be reduced by recording engineer to frequency response ONLY at all...even if he scream otherwise...
😁😊
Second- the reason why this is so is that when we speak of timbre in audio system playback experience we speak of timbre not from the musician perspective only, not from the recording engineer perspective only, but from an acoustical more general viewpoint including for sure the neurophysiology of hearing but also the particular listening history of the tested and testing subject, here an audiophile listening to his system in his own specific room and perspective.... The ears listening history of the subject play a part, the playback installation gear specific system play a part and the specificity of the room acoustic another part.... Reducing all that to frequency response is an engineer joke....Or a bad reply to a complex subject....
Third- reducing TIMBRE to frequency response only is so limited and beside the point, and reflecting a purely technological narrow view that someone saying this just prove he has no idea what the timbre perception or production is... Why? Because the complex phenomenon associated with timbre perception or production cannot be reduced to linear or non linear frequencies responses .... A problem spanning human perception, acoustic physic and neurophysiology and art and psychology or linguistic cannot be ONLY "really just frequency response"....
Four- Not only then did you seems to know nothing about timbre but you dont even seems know that you dont understand the stating of the problem itself at all...
Five- i will give you a clue:
Read this text from a textbook on timbre about the limitations of the Helmholtz definition of timbre, and if you are able to understand this few sentences you will understand WHY timbre cannot be reduced to only frequency responses:
Regarding timbre, Helmholtz stated: “The quality of the musical portion of a
compound tone depends solely on the number and relative strength of its partial
simple tones, and in no respect on their difference of phase” (Helmholtz 1877,
p. 126). This exclusively spectral perspective of timbre, locating the parameter in
the relative amplitude of partial tones and nothing else, has dominated the feld for
a long time. But it is interesting to note how narrowly defned his object of study
was, the “musical portion” of a tone: “… a musical tone strikes the ear as a perfectly
undisturbed, uniform sound which remains unaltered as long as it exists, and it
K. Siedenburg et al.7
presents no alternation of various kinds of constituents” (Helmholtz 1877, p. 7–8).
By assuming completely stationary sounds, his notion of tone color was indeed a
strong simplifcation of what is understood as timbre today. Most obviously, attack
and decay transients are not considered by this approach. Helmholtz was quite
aware of this fact: “When we speak in what follows of a musical quality of tone, we
shall disregard these peculiarities of beginning and ending, and confine our attention to the peculiarities of the musical tone which continues uniformly” (Helmholtz
1877, p. 67). This means that Helmholtz’s approach to timbre had its limitations
(cf., Kursell 2013).
1.2.2 Timbre Acoustics, Perception, and Cognition by Kai Siedenburg, Charalampos Saitis, Stephen McAdams, Arthur N. Popper, Richard R. Fay Page 7
Helmholtz was conscious in his definition of timbre that he must put aside some characteristics very fundamental but secondary for his purely mathematical approach with Fourier series... But in the modern more complete definition of timbre what was putting aside is at the core center of the timbre interdisciplinary studies....
Now for your understanding read this definition of timbre in wikipedia, a very elementary and simplified one and try to distinguish clearly WHY timbre cannot be reduce to frequency response ONLY...
Range between tonal and noiselike character
Spectral envelope
Time envelope in terms of rise, duration, and decay (ADSR, which stands for "attack, decay, sustain, release")
Changes both of spectral envelope (formant-glide) and fundamental frequency (micro-intonation)
Prefix, or onset of a sound, quite dissimilar to the ensuing lasting vibration
A clue: the mechanism to produce and perceive "timbre" is not reducible to pure linear mechanic only,nor to the body/gesture of the singer or to the microdynamic gesture of the musician, neither to simply acoustic perception and acoustic variable and changing conditions but also implied changes in the brain subject and his precise listening specific history ... When a singer produce a tone there is way more factors at play than frequencies response only....It is the same thing for an audiophile recreating for himself in a specific room with specific gear the timbre experience and perception for himself....It is the same thing for speech sound recognition....Impossible to reduce this complex problerm to frequency response.....
«For an idiot using all the times a hammer all is nails, and sometimes even for a wise man, if the hammer is near his hands, all he see is nails»-Anonymus Smith
«My hammer was the only nail i had»-Groucho Marx