MUSIC

How Music works part II

: Pitch

MS. RANA MAGDY

NATIONAL ANTHEM
SCHOOL ANTHEM
 C Major
C D E F G A B C

DO RE MI Fa Sol La Ti DO
let's sing c major scale
WHAT IS PITCH IN MUSIC ?
 Pitch is one of the most fundamental words in all of
music. Everything that deals with melody and
harmony, scales and chords, starts with pitch. But it
is also sometimes misunderstood, and often, what
we think of as pitch is different from its actual
meaning. We might think of a note as sounding
“higher” or “lower” than another note, but what
does that actually mean?
DEFINITION OF PITCH
 What actually happens when you play a note on an instrument?

 Whether you pluck a piano key, strum a guitar string, or blow into a
saxophone, that instrument produces a sound wave.

 A sound wave is just vibrations of air molecules that go back and forth,
creating a wave of pressure that travels from the instrument (that produces
the sound) and is picked up by our ears.

 The main property of a sound wave is its frequency, which is just a word
for how fast the cycle of the wave is.
 Pitch is then how the human ear hears and understands that frequency.

 This is all a bit technical and mathematical, but just know that pitch is basically
the frequency of a note.

 The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch, and vice versa; the lower the
frequency, the lower the pitch.

 So, a note sounds “higher” or “lower” than another note if it has a higher or
lower frequency than that note.

 You can easily see on a staff what notes are high-pitched and which are lower
because they are literally written “higher” on the staff.
  Here is an example of notes rising in pitch.

And the opposite is also true. The lower the note is written on a
stave, the lower the pitch.

Here’s an example of notes descending in pitch.