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# 1 Pitch in Western music

A note is a musical sound of fixed pitch. A pitch is perceived when a voice or an instrument produces a sound at a steady frequency, or rate of vibration.

Musicians in many traditions understand the music they play to be made up of notes that sound different from one another. The differences between these notes can be described in two ways: in terms of pitch and of frequency. The term ‘pitch’ focuses on the listener’s perception of a note, as higher or lower in relation to other notes. The word ‘frequency’ focuses on the objective measurement of a note, in terms of vibrations per second.

In this first activity, you’ll begin by familiarising yourself with the relationship between the frequency of a sound and its pitch.

## Activity 1

Allow around 5 minutes

Visit the Online Tone Generator website (open the link in a new tab/window so you can easily return here). Make sure that your speakers or headphones are set at a moderate volume, read the warning on the page, and then press ‘play’.

Move the slider a centimetre or so to the right and then a centimetre or so to the left of its starting position. Observe how the pitch changes when you move the slider. It gets higher when you move the slider to the right and lower when you move it to the left. Similarly, the number indicating the frequency of vibration (the number with ‘Hz’ after it just below the slider bar) gets higher when you move the slider to the right and lower when you move it to the left.

The Online Tone Generator’s slider feature reveals how the pitch you perceive changes in a continuous way, gradually increasing as the frequency gets higher or lower. In many musical traditions, however, pitch is understood less as a continuum than as a series of discrete notes. (In fact, the word ‘pitch’ is often used as a synonym for ‘note’.) In this course, the terms gamut and pitch system will be used to refer to collections of notes.

Pitch systems are learned, cultural structures. They shape how music is made and how it is heard, and they help determine how instruments are constructed. Although the parts of pitch systems are often quantified using numbers and ratios (for example, with reference to frequency), they are primarily cultural systems that vary over time and from community to community.

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OpenLearn - Introduction to music theory 2: pitch and notation
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