Pitch
The first and most obvious element we recognize in music is pitch in my opinion. A melody is made up of various pitches or notes occurring at specific intervals/distances from one another that make them noticeable, pleasing or not. Melody is usually what captures people the most about music as a well composed melody can convey an emotion that we can relate to. The most natural instrument used to communicate a melody is the voice. The attempt to recreate sounds or melodies requires our ability to recognize pitches, sound quality, and duration of notes and while it isn’t necessary to know the science itself in order to imitate these sounds, you would need to intuitively recognize these characteristics at a bare minimum.
So what are pitches? If you take whistling as an example, you can see how changing the size of the space between your lips and the placement of the tongue affects the sound you make. Similarly, if you take a balloon filled with air and pinch the balloon to let a small amount of air out, you can control the amount of air rushing out of the balloon. Loosening the opening allows more air to pass through and for the rubber to vibrate at a slower speed while stretching/pulling the rubber farther apart will tighten the opening causing the rubber to vibrate at a much faster frequency. The faster vibration results in a higher sound while the slower vibration results in a lower sound. This is exactly what occurs when singing except the tightening and loosening occurs in the vocal chords.
When playing guitar, there is a slight difference as it is an actual string that is vibrating however the concept is similar in that the slower a string vibrates, the lower the sound will be and as you shorten the string by holding subsequently higher frets, the vibration of the string increases and therefore causes subsequently higher pitches/notes/sounds.
A balloon, vocal chords, or whistling sounds are a result of air rushing through as it is the air that causes the vibration of the balloon or vocal chords. In the case of a guitar, since it is not a wind instrument but rather a string instrument, the string must be struck, or plucked, for it to vibrate, just as a percussion instrument must be hit for it to emit a sound.
Pitch can therefore be initiated through the act of striking, plucking, or blowing air onto or through something for which the frequency of the vibration can be controlled in a way that will cause a rise or drop in pitch. The movement of the air particles, or sound wave, can then travel to a receiver … recording device or the human ear, which can then interpret the tone, pitch, and amplitude signals into sound.
Sound waves can be compared to dropping a rock into a lake. A small pebble will create multiple small ripples while a large rock will create lesser but bigger ripples over the same distance. The ripples, although they are moving water particles instead of air, would be a visual representation of how sound waves work. Over time the height of the ripple will begin to decrease until the ripple is no longer visible, just as the volume of a sound wave will decrease until it is no longer heard.
In music, an A note/pitch is a frequency that is vibrating at 440 Hz while a G note is vibrating at 392Hz and a B note which is higher than A would be vibrating at 493.88 Hz over a similar moment in time (ie. millisecond). Doubling the frequency (or speed) would mean that you will hear the same note yet at a higher pitch … for example an A note vibrates at 440Hz and is called A4 while a note vibrating at 880Hz is still an A but is called an A5 since it is still an A but at a higher pitch or ‘octave’. Octaves will be explained in better detail soon so don’t be too concerned about not understanding this term right now. The importance of this section is to understand that pitch is determined by the speed at which the sound wave is vibrating within a given duration and that the number of repeated vibrations, or ‘repetitions’ are what is called ‘frequency’.
That said, if you do experiment with creating different pitches, you’ll notice that at some point you won’t hear very high or very low pitches. This does not mean that there is no sound presently being made however, as the human ear can only hear a specific range of frequencies (20 Hz to 20,000 Hz). Younger people have a wider range while older people have a narrower range of hearing as they lose their ability to hear over time … either due to aging, from over exposure to louder music throughout their lives, or both. While increasing volume might allow you to hear some of these frequencies that are normally out of our range of hearing, there is a limit to what our ears can handle both in frequency and in volume therefore you will eventually stop hearing certain frequencies. Dogs, for example, have a different hearing range from humans and can therefore hear much higher pitch frequencies than humans. This is why a dog whistle is heard by a dog but not a human.
Note: Be very careful if you attempt to raise the volume in an attempt to hear these sounds as you may actually damage your hearing in the process since your ear is still attempting to process the sound even though it may not have the ability to convert it to a signal that the brain can interpret.
I could just have easily compared pitch to length or width since there is no particular reason to think that higher sounds are at the top and lower sounds are at the bottom however I specifically chose to compare pitch to height so that I could explain how we automatically assume that a slower vibrating sound is ‘lower’ while a faster vibrating sound is ‘higher’. The reason for the change in pitch is due to the vibration speed or frequency over time however we generally understand or express faster vibrations as being physically higher sounds and slower vibrations as lower sounds.
