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:
“He maintained that the case was lost or won by the time the final juror had been sworn in; his summation was set in his mind before the first witness was called. It was all in the orchestration, he claimed: in knowing how and where to pitch each and every particular argument; who to intimidate; who to trust, who to flatter and court; who to challenge; when to underplay and exactly when to let out all the stops.”
—Dorothy Uhnak (b. 1933)