Loudness or pitch can be scaled in a space of one dimension. Timbre is multidimensional. The timbre of a musical sound or voice depends upon its time‐varying spectral envelope and periodic fluctuations of amplitude or fundamental frequency. The strengths and weaknesses of scales in describing aspects of tone sensation are contrasted in the light of experiment and theory, both old and new. Multidimensional examples are perceptual spaces of voices and musical structures. Unidimensional examples are the standard scales of loudness and pitch. The adequacy of these is questioned by some recent work done with Norman H. Anderson and based on functional measurement theory. Thus, in one series of experiments, subjects judged loudness averages and differences of noise arrays. The resulting interval scale indicates that loudness is the one‐third power of sound pressure. New work on loudness and pitch scales obtained in bisectioning tasks will be presented.