Timbrevary

Timbrevary is a term used in theoretical discussions of sound design and audio research to describe a concise approach to encoding or describing timbre across short time intervals. The word blends timbre, the color or quality of a sound, with brevary, suggesting brevity. It is used to discuss representations that decompose complex sounds into a sequence of short timbral frames, typically on the order of tens to hundreds of milliseconds, each characterized by a small set of features such as spectral centroid, spectral slope, brightness, roughness, and attack or onset characteristics.

In practice, timbrevary can support tasks like efficient audio compression, rapid timbre morphing, or adaptive synthesis by enabling fast interpolation between timbral states. It is related to but distinct from traditional spectral representations and granular synthesis: instead of focusing on spectral frames for pitch and amplitude, timbrevary emphasizes preserving or manipulating timbral quality over time.

Origin and usage: the term appears in speculative or experimental discussions about how to model and manipulate sound in a temporally fine-grained but computationally efficient way. It is not a standardized technical specification and is not widely adopted in mainstream DSP documentation.

See also: timbre, granular synthesis, spectral envelope, short-time Fourier transform, audio feature extraction, sound synthesis.