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Pitch is a perceptual property that allows sounds to be ordered on a frequency-related scale, [1] or more commonly, pitch is the quality that makes it possible to judge sounds as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies. [2] Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre ...
The pitch of a word rises until it reaches a downstep and then drops abruptly. In a two-syllable word, a contrast thus occurs between high–low and low–high. Accentless words are also low–high, but the pitch of following enclitics differentiates them. [80]
Pitch accents in English serve as a cue to prominence, along with duration, intensity, and spectral composition. Pitch accents are made up of a high (H) or low (L) pitch target or a combination of an H and an L target. The pitch accents of English used in the ToBI prosodic transcription system are: H*, L*, L*+H, L+H*, and H+!H*. [7]
Scales are typically listed from low to high pitch. Most scales are octave-repeating, meaning their pattern of notes is the same in every octave (the Bohlen–Pierce scale is one exception). An octave-repeating scale can be represented as a circular arrangement of pitch classes, ordered by increasing (or decreasing) pitch class.
Very high pitch is for strong emotion or emphasis. [21] Pitch can indicate attitude: for example, Great uttered in isolation can indicate weak emotion (with pitch starting medium and dropping to low), enthusiasm (with pitch starting very high and ending low), or sarcasm (with pitch starting and remaining low).
The upper pitch range of the human voice is, on average, about half as high in males as in females. [3] Even after controlling for body height and volume, the male voice remains lower. Charles Darwin suggested that the human voice evolved through intersexual sexual selection, [4] via female mate choices.
This list of frequencies is for a theoretically ideal piano. On an actual piano, the ratio between semitones is slightly larger, especially at the high and low ends, where string stiffness causes inharmonicity, i.e., the tendency for the harmonic makeup of each note to run sharp.
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...