Pitch: Impact on Audio Vibrations Essay

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Pitch is a property of musical sound that depends on the frequency of vibration of the sounding body. The pitch units in music are tone, semitone, and cent. Sound vibrations occurring according to the harmonic law, with a specific frequency, are perceived by a person as a particular musical tone. High-frequency vibrations are perceived as high-pitched sounds, and low-frequency vibrations as low-pitched sounds. Depending on the possibility of determining the pitch, musical instruments are divided into instruments of determinate pitch and indeterminate pitch. Sounds of a specific pitch have harmonic frequency spectra or are close to harmonic. Instruments of determinate pitch are a piano, guitar, violin, flute, trumpet, and xylophone. Not all musical instruments make specific notes with pure pitch. For example, pitchless percussion instruments do not play certain pitches. Among the instruments of indeterminate pitch are shakers, cymbals, triangles, and most types of drums. Such instruments reproduce many different sounds that do not have harmonic spectra.

The chosen examples are the violin, which is an instrument of determinate pitch, and Balinese cengceng cymbals, which are instruments of indeterminate pitch. Violin refers to the Western musical culture, while cengceng comes from the non-Western musical culture. The Western system is characterized by performance with 12 specific sounds, built in sequence from low to high or from high to low. Bakan (2011) notes that standard Western scales are major, minor, pentatonic, and blues. On the contrary, the non-Western system uses unique scales, such as slendro and pelog. The non-Western system often uses scales consisting of five or seven notes. Thus, based on the assignment of instruments to different musical cultures, their sound is different. When playing the violin, high and low tones are easily distinguished, while cengceng sound strange and even out of tune to a Western listener. Despite the differences in performance, it is correct to say that pitch plays an important role in music by making it possible to create higher and lower sounds within the created melodies. In other words, pitch defines how each note may sound through specific audio vibrations.

Reference

Bakan, M. (2011). World music: Traditions and transformations (2nd ed.). McGraw Hill.

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