The Attack of the Piano

The attack is the noise involved in getting the sound going. If we play these two aysat exactly the same time, our brains are forwrd into thinking they heard just one not. But with the slightest discrepancyyou can still tell that the notes we hear are the same note but we hear two attacks. The sounds of a violin and a flue are exceptionally similar if you hear them without the attack. So this crunchy sound just at the beginning of generating the note, that's the attack of a violin. And that's of what allows our brains to differentiate between instruments as well as the varying volumes of the overtones.