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
Origin and usage: the term appears in speculative or experimental discussions about how to model and manipulate
See also: timbre, granular synthesis, spectral envelope, short-time Fourier transform, audio feature extraction, sound synthesis.