In western classical music, the impure timbre is more unpleasant than the timbre without any impurity. Therefore, musicians usually intentionally avoid the production of the former timbre. In other musical cultures, however, the impure timbre is an integral part of musical styles. The present paper proposes an auditory model for the impure timbre on the theoretical basis of auditory scene analysis. Examples of the impure timbre in instrumental and vocal music are analyzed with spectrograms and harmonic-to-noise ratios.