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A transient is a short-duration non-tonal, non-periodic sound element, usually of high amplitude and typically comprising high-frequency components. In the case of sounds generated by musical instruments, transients inherently present at the beginning of tonal waveforms are often critical to the instrument's aural signature and recognition. Transients can also be caused by a variety of fault conditions, such as incorrect clocking in digital systems.

Some form of corruption — wanted or unwanted — of the source signal. All forms of distortion are formed by non-linearities in an electronic circuit or an audio transducer. Harmonic Distortion is typically caused by over-loading to some degree components in the signal pathi, resulting in the addition or stengthening of odd and/or even harmonics of fundamental frequencies present in the source signal. Anharmonic distortion involves the introduction of frequencies not musically related to the source signal, usually through some form of modulation process, such as aliasing in overloaded digital equipment, or scrape flutter in analogue tape machines. Some forms of distortion are often added intentionally to a musical source to alter it's character in a pleasing way — such as on an electric guitar, for example.