tones

Tones is a term used across disciplines to indicate a perceptible quality of sound, color, or attitude, often related to pitch, brightness, or mood.

In music, a tone is a sound with a definite pitch, produced by a vibrating body; duration and timbre are additional aspects. In traditional Western theory, a tone is the interval of a whole step, while a semitone is a half step; modern usage often treats tone as any pitched sound.

In linguistics, tone languages use pitch patterns to distinguish meanings of words. Tones can be level (high, mid, low) or contour (rising, falling, rising-falling). Tone can be lexical, changing word meaning, or grammatical, marking grammatical features in some languages.

In color theory and visual arts, a tone is created by adding gray to a hue, reducing saturation; tone can also refer to the perceived lightness or brightness of a color, producing warm or cool tones and helping to establish depth and mood in an image.

In writing and rhetoric, tone denotes the author’s or speaker’s attitude toward the subject or audience, such as formal, informal, ironic, or sympathetic. The concept of tone thus spans perceptual properties of sound and color as well as expressive qualities in language and communication.