[OmarShehata]

I think just saying "it's timbre" or stating these terms isn't helpful. I've read dozens of articles that try to explain these concepts but still left me with lingering questions.

This was my attempt to show you how you can derive the answer from first principles, just by analyzing the sound, and forming your own hypothesis/getting to these conclusions yourself.

The links at the end do have resources for the physics and theory behind it.

[y2bd]

I actually do appreciate this teaching style, as long as you do put notes to the established theory and terminology at the end.

It's like that popular Monad tutorial that has you implementing Functors and Monads in order to solve a problem without ever telling you until the end that what you just created were Functors and Monads.

Starting off with the well-known terminology kind of colors the discussion from the beginning--even folks who don't really know what harmonics or timbre or monads or applicatives are probably have some general impression, and that impression could be wrong in a way that prevents them from learning.

[neltnerb]

If you titled the article "Timbre -- why notes sound different across instruments" then the reader would know which wikipedia article to look up or which search terms to use to learn more.

No reason that learning a fairly interesting word's definition can't be part of the lesson...