Pitch is a fundamental concept in music that refers to the perceived highness or lowness of a sound. It is a perceptual property of sounds that allows their ordering on a frequency-related scale. Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre. When an instrument plays a note, it creates a physical vibration, also known as acoustic energy or a sound wave. The vibration moves a specified number of times per second. Higher pitches vibrate quicker, while lower pitches vibrate slower. Pitch may be quantified as a frequency, but it is not a purely objective physical property; it is a subjective psychoacoustical attribute of sound. Historically, the study of pitch and pitch perception has been a central problem in psychoacoustics, and has been instrumental in forming and testing theories of sound representation, processing, and perception in the auditory system.
Some key points about pitch in music include:
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Absolute Pitch: This is the ability to identify by ear any note at some standard pitch or to sing a specified note at will.
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Standard Pitches: In Western music, standard pitches have long been used to facilitate tuning among various performing groups. Usually, A above middle C is taken as a reference pitch. The current standard pitch of A = 440 Hz was adopted in 1939.
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Measuring Pitch: There are two main ways to measure pitch: scientific and musical. The scientific measurement tells us how many times a sound wave vibrates per second, measured in Hertz. In music theory and notation, notes are ascribed an alphabetical letter between A and G. We can identify a pitch by both.
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Pitch and Melody: Melodies form when musicians combine pitch with duration, which is how long a note sustains before going silent or giving way to another note.
