This article is rated Stub-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Music theory This article is within the scope of WikiProject Music theory, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of music theory, theory terminology, music theorists, and musical analysis on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Music theoryWikipedia:WikiProject Music theoryTemplate:WikiProject Music theoryMusic theory ??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

The opening sentence of this article reads ,"A musical tone is a steady periodic sound. A musical tone is characterized by its duration, pitch, intensity (or loudness), and timbre (or quality).[1] The notes used in music can be more complex than musical tones, as they may include aperiodic aspects, such as attack transients, vibrato, and envelope modulation." I recommend this be revised because "A musical tone" is not necessarily steady, in fact rarely is and although periodicity is a phenomenon of sound waves, that is unnecessary, if not confusing, for purposes of defining a tone, especially since the second sentence refers to aperiodic aspects. Vibrato is one technique of among many of tone production and might be addressed additionally, but not as part of the primary definition. I suggest the opening sentence be revised as follows: "A musical tone is a combination of the phenomena of pitch, duration, intensity (or loudness), timbre, and attack and release." Then briefly describe those elements in more detail.Jacques Bailhé (talk) 20:07, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think the description as written covers the physics or engineering characteristics of a tone that one uses in a piece of music. This to me would be called pitch in music.

I think this article should describe musical tone and musical shape in a different way. I think musical tone and musical shape are more about the psychological or emotional effects music has on the person. I don't find this is an easy thing to describe but there must be a general understanding perhaps influenced by the musical genre (classical, baroque, jazz, pastoral, rock). I might expect words like jolly, melancholic, angry, defeated to be used in a description of the tone and shape of a piece of music. Or may be terms like "typical of pieces written in the Baroque period"

To get some sort of handle on this I looked at ABRSM's five marking criteria for their performance exams: Tone, Shape, and Pitch, Rhythm and Performance. Unfortunately, ABRSM assumes the reader already knows what they are when it comes to assessing a performance. The marking criteria use the words "sensitive use of tonal qualities" and "uneven or unreliable". For shape the criteria uses the words "idiomatic musical shaping and detail" and "musical shape and detail unrealised". The frequency of the acoustic vibrations generated by the instrument are not relevant to that assessment. I wish I knew the answer. Perhaps a music teacher with more than my basic knowledge could help forge a more useful description. Loudraspberry (talk) 09:34, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]