Pitch (music)

Pitch (music)

Pitch is a perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale. Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies, which require "sound whose frequency is clear and stable enough to be heard as not noise". Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre.

Pitch may be quantified as a frequency, but pitch 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.

Read more about Pitch (music):  Definite and Indefinite Pitch, Concert Pitch, Labeling Pitches, Scales, Other Musical Meanings of Pitch

Famous quotes containing the word pitch:

    I dream that I have brought
    To such a pitch my thought
    That coming time can say,
    “He shadowed in a glass
    What thing her body was.”
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)