sonority
The quality or character of a musical sound, especially its richness and fullness.
In Depth
Sonority describes the overall sonic quality of a sound or combination of sounds — how rich, full, resonant, or colourful it is. A chord played by a full orchestra has a different sonority from the same chord played on a piano, even though the notes are identical. Sonority encompasses timbre, volume, register, spacing, and the acoustic properties of the performance space.
Composers think carefully about sonority when orchestrating. The same chord can sound warm, bright, dark, or transparent depending on which instruments play it and in what register. Ravel and Debussy were master colourists who chose instruments primarily for their sonority rather than their melodic function. In contemporary music, sonority itself has become a primary compositional element.
The unique sonority of a Stradivarius violin has been attributed to everything from the varnish to the wood density to the Little Ice Age — over 300 years later, no one has definitively explained it.