An emphasized frequency component of an instrumental or vocal sound that does not change with pitch, and which helps to distinguishes one instrument from another, and gives voices their unique characteristic. Problems arise in the audio world where pitch shifting is common, (samplers, DAW editing) since in this case the formant characteristic is pitch-shifted along with the overall pitch of the signal, making the resulting audio file sound unnatural. Various manufactures of pitch shifting processors have tried to address this issue with a modicum of success.