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Since pitch is such a close proxy for frequency, it is almost entirely determined by how quickly the sound wave is making the air vibrate and has almost nothing to do with the intensity, or amplitude, of the wave. That is, "high" pitch means very rapid oscillation, and "low" pitch corresponds to slower oscillation.
For waves that propagate in a medium, such as sound waves, the velocity of the observer and of the source are relative to the medium in which the waves are transmitted. [3] The total Doppler effect in such cases may therefore result from motion of the source, motion of the observer, motion of the medium, or any combination thereof.
Vibration, standing waves in a string. The fundamental and the first 5 overtones in the harmonic series. A vibration in a string is a wave. Resonance causes a vibrating string to produce a sound with constant frequency, i.e. constant pitch. If the length or tension of the string is correctly adjusted, the sound produced is a musical tone.
It is the property of sound that most determines pitch. [1] The generally accepted standard hearing range for humans is 20 to 20,000 Hz. [2] [3] [4] In air at atmospheric pressure, these represent sound waves with wavelengths of 17 metres (56 ft) to 1.7 centimetres (0.67 in).
Pitch is perceived as how "low" or "high" a sound is and represents the cyclic, repetitive nature of the vibrations that make up sound. For simple sounds, pitch relates to the frequency of the slowest vibration in the sound (called the fundamental harmonic). In the case of complex sounds, pitch perception can vary.
In theory, the speed of sound is actually the speed of vibrations. Sound waves in solids are composed of compression waves (just as in gases and liquids) and a different type of sound wave called a shear wave, which occurs only in solids. Shear waves in solids usually travel at different speeds than compression waves, as exhibited in seismology.
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The Railsback curve shows how a piano tuned to compensate for inharmonicity deviates from theoretically correct equal-tempered tuning. The Railsback curve, first measured in the 1930s by O.L. Railsback, a US college physics teacher, expresses the difference between inharmonicity-aware stretched piano tuning, and theoretically correct equal-tempered tuning in which the frequencies of successive ...