25
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Accepted
What is the reason a given note can have different "sounds"
Simple answer - overtones or harmonics. Each sound producing machine (instrument) has the propensity to produce not only the fundamental (first harmonic), but others too. The mix of whichever these ...
- 186k
21
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What is the reason a given note can have different "sounds"
There's more to an instrument's waveform than the over-riding 'perceived pitch' frequency. There's lots of other frequencies mixed in there.
And apart from the sustain portion of a musical note (...
- 87k
11
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What determines a Note?
Historically, two pitches whose frequencies are in a 2:1 ratio (or 4:1, or 8:1, etc.) are considered "the same". This is known as octave equivalence, and it based on how well frequencies in ...
- 75.5k
11
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A melody is built from both notes and chords
Your question deals with pitch and how it is used expressively.
The expressiveness of a single pitch is limited, but I would not say it has no expressiveness, no character. Excluding other factors ...
- 54.1k
9
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Do People and/or Robots Speak on Pitch and in Harmony with themselves?
There are some facts in this question, but they get tangled in some misunderstandings and assumptions. Let's see if we can sort them out:
All sound has frequency—you can measure how far apart the ...
- 13.2k
8
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Pitch and Hearing beginner question
We say that C and Ḉ are "the same note" because their frequencies (rates of vibration) are in a 1:2 ratio. In other words, the sound waves of Ḉ vibrate twice as fast as those of C, and the ...
- 83.2k
8
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What is the reason a given note can have different "sounds"
The essential terms you want to use are timbre, overtones, and fundamental.
The "sound" difference between voice, flute, guitar, etc. is called timbre.
Different timbres are the results of ...
- 54.1k
8
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A melody is built from both notes and chords
I wouldn't work too hard to derive "truths" from this website. It has a point to make, and there are some good aspects to that point, but it's a very simple point and it makes it in a ...
- 13.2k
7
votes
What is the reason a given note can have different "sounds"
Because of harmonics.
When we hear a note on an instrument, we're actually hearing a mix of waves at different frequencies playing together. One frequency, the lowest and usually loudest is called the ...
- 386
6
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What is the reason a given note can have different "sounds"
Some details to add to Tim's answer:
Many musical instruments, and also human voice, produce also non-harmonic components. For example, the knock of the piano hammer on the string, air whistling in ...
- 14.5k
5
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Do People and/or Robots Speak on Pitch and in Harmony with themselves?
The tonal language into dialect of spoken Mandarin Chinese involves smooth portamentos/glissandos/bends when speaking word tones, such as rising (e.g. Mandarin for "white") or descending (e....
- 13.3k
5
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Accepted
Portamento in the Scream Tracker
Scream Tracker is one of the first, if not the first, early PC clones of Amiga tracker music replayers, and I assume it attempts to replicate ProTracker's behavior at least to some extent. The linked ...
- 26.2k
5
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Accepted
Are there languages/cultures which use a different mental framing of note pitch than "low/high"?
Yes, and you don't even need to move far from English. In Norwegian, “høy lyd” (literally “high sound”) denotes a loud noise, and “lav lyd” means soft sound. To describe a high-pitched sound, you'd ...
- 35k
4
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Viol Tuning lowest note
Well, there's a pretty good argument for considering the modern concert string bass to be a "member of the viol family," and although the standard 4-string tuning puts the lowest string at ...
- 13.2k
4
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Pitch and Hearing beginner question
Music theory says that notes with the same name are "the same note" even though they are obviously different pitches. When played together, it can sound like a single pitch even though there ...
- 75.5k
4
votes
Accepted
calculating midi pitch bend value from key numbers with fractional part
I would like to start with two comments:
There are already virtual instruments which support microtonal tuning. That might be the best solution for you. See also this link provided by @Tetsujin https:...
- 14.5k
3
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A melody is built from both notes and chords
since a good melody does have a certain feel of mood, the melody is
built from both notes and chords
No. A good melody may imply chords, meaning that hearing the melody alone is enough to invoke ...
- 26.2k
2
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The relation between making a note from "pitch & duration" and "name & octave"
Mingus must have a way of indicating duration. Note name and octave are a way of specifying pitch.
JythonMusic specifies pitch as a numeric quantity corresponding to a MIDI key identifier. Tables ...
- 17.9k
2
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Accepted
The relation between making a note from "pitch & duration" and "name & octave"
In music theory terms, pitch and duration are independent elements. Knowing one gives no information about the other.
In Mingus, note names and octaves are considered as separate elements defining a ...
- 75.5k
2
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Are there languages/cultures which use a different mental framing of note pitch than "low/high"?
Ancient Greek music ordered notes by frequency but in reverse order from what is done now. The best reason I read (but I don't remember where) was that the Greek stringed instruments were strung much ...
- 24.4k
2
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Do People and/or Robots Speak on Pitch and in Harmony with themselves?
Nope! People will not conform to scales in general speech. Check out this video, where a musician Youtuber (with an excellent musical ear) tries to play his piano in harmony with a video of a pastor ...
- 1,601
2
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Pitch and Hearing beginner question
is it because music theory says so or is there a scientific reason? (for example, like Li and Na have same-ish properties in the Periodic table.)
Well music theory does say so, but you can ...
- 808
2
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Do People and/or Robots Speak on Pitch and in Harmony with themselves?
When pitch is used in language it is just enough to either voice and not voice the sounds of speech or to give a relative direction to a pitch bend.
Music on the other hand treats pitch very precisely ...
- 54.1k
2
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If I have a combination of pitches played as a chord in a MIDI, how do I extract only two pitches from it and get somewhat similar tone?
Assuming you mean to do this by a computer program...
You could invert the tones so they are a tertian stack then take the root and third.
You could invert to a tertian stack, take the root, and then ...
- 54.1k
2
votes
A melody is built from both notes and chords
Yes and no. There's often the definition of melody as a serial progression of notes and harmony as notes being played in parallel. So if you imagine a chord as being 2 or more notes being struck at ...
- 161
1
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If I have a combination of pitches played as a chord in a MIDI, how do I extract only two pitches from it and get somewhat similar tone?
One way to go about this would be to consider an approximate harmonic spectrum for your instrument and use this to estimate the harmonic spectrum for your chord. Then try to find two (or more ...
- 14.9k
1
vote
Do People and/or Robots Speak on Pitch and in Harmony with themselves?
There must be cultural and personal variations of preference of intervals in speech. The reason I think this is that in one job, I had a whole bunch of Polish co-workers. SOME, but not all of the ...
- 4,570
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Do People and/or Robots Speak on Pitch and in Harmony with themselves?
I can't imagine, that for most parts of speech one is able to determine a frequency at all, due to the high (dependent on the language) proportion of consonants, which in the musical sense are more ...
- 10.6k
1
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Do People and/or Robots Speak on Pitch and in Harmony with themselves?
I can't imagine any language spoken solely on the notes of the scale. Speech isn't in tune!
In English speech, the pitch of the voice is constantly changing: from syllable to syllable and even within ...
- 5,460
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