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I thought frequency was dependent on linear density, μ, and not voluminous density, ρ. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.225.203.115 ( talk) 02:09, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
What is meant by the "very nearly" in 'pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower", and are quantified as frequencies (cycles per second, or hertz), corresponding very nearly to the repetition rate of sound waves.' in the second paragraph?
It seems to be saying "frequencies" are different to "repetition rates" - in what way?
Or maybe it was intended to say that "pitch" corresponds "very nearly" to "frequency", while at the moment it says that one is "quantified as" the other.
I am unsure, so I have not changed it.
FrankSier ( talk) 22:03, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure how to go about clarifying the lead any further, without getting into too much elementary explanation. First sentence says it "represents the perceived fundamental frequency..." and in the second paragraph it says "pitch is not an objective physical property, but a subjective psychophysical attribute of sound." Then it says pitch is "quantified as frequencies (cycles per second, or hertz), by comparison with sine waves." (I've emphasized a couple of phrases there.)
@Woodstone: I am pretty sure that an electronically generated signal through a high-quality audio system with a good reference-grade transducer (e.g. speaker or earphone) can come as close to a pure sinewave as needed. I believe tuning forks put out vibration with few overtones, perhaps good enough for psychoacoustic measurements? __ Just plain Bill ( talk) 15:53, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
Rather than talk about it, I have taken the liberty or reworking the second paragraph in the lead. I have removed some detail and some refs. As I say above, the lead should summarize the article. Please feel free to include detail (e.g. sine wave vs. other waveforms) and refs in the body. Let me know what you think. -- Kvng ( talk) 17:01, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
In the section on "Perception of Pitch", just-noticeable difference is described as being approximately 4.3 cents (a cent being one-hundredth of a semitone), or about 0.36 Hz in the range 1 kHz to 2kHz. But one cent in that octave is about 0.82 Hz, so 4.3 cents would be 3.6 Hz, or ten times greater than what's stated. Either the 4.3 cents is too high by an order of magnitude, or the 0.36 Hz is too low by an order of magnitude. I'm inclined to think it's the latter (it seems incredible that an ordinary ear, or really any ear, could discern 0.4 Hz in that octave), but don't want to make the change unless it's known for sure which is the case. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the citation in question (Olson 1967); could someone take a looksee and verify that it's the latter? BrianTung ( talk) 00:28, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
I'm writing an article about a bird species and one of the sources I'm consulting says the following about its song:
I've got no idea of waht it means and I really don't know anything about acoustics, so I'd appreciate a simple non-technical explanation. Thanks! -- 186.108.175.201 ( talk) 15:12, 7 March 2011 (UTC)
We had a thorough discussion about the lead back in January. That resulted in the following:
The lead has continued to evolve since then and to my eye it is not improving further. I propose to restore the lead to the above. -- Kvng ( talk) 13:06, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
"the fundamental frequency definition and the definition about ordering notes on a scale are complimentary, so you don't need the equivocations. They're misleading."
Thanks everyone for your contributions. It looks like things are headed in the right direction. I've added a contribution of my own. I no longer feel like the the older revisions are better than the current. -- Kvng ( talk) 03:11, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
I know I'm tempting fate, but I've just switched the order of the first two sentences in the lead so that we first learn what pitch is, then what class it belongs to.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 02:04, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Does whoever added the fact about melody in the first paragraph of the lead want to step forward? Just in case anyone wants to challenge it, I'm not the person you need to speak with.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 04:35, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Also, could we give an example of a high-pitched sound and a low-pitched sound in the lead? We should allow for the possibility that someone might visit this page because they don't already know what pitch is, and I think examples may be useful to him or her.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 02:27, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
This section is quite long and cumbersome and could do with some subsections and wording adjustments. I'll begin tweaking it, and if there's anything I don't understand or think is redundant or irrelevant I'll post it to this section for clarification and comment.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 02:27, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
I think you need to slow down. You've gone from copy editing to a major and unilateral rewrite. You've changed sourced statements like "Pitches are sometimes quantified as frequencies (cycles per second, or hertz), by comparison with sine waves" to new versions that do not capture as well what the sources say. You've left references attached to other statements that you changed; did you check the sources to see if they support what you wrote?
Dicklyon (
talk)
04:00, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Ah ha. Sounds like you know a great deal about the physics of sound. Quite honestly, the meaning and relevance of that sentence are lost on me. Not trying to call the accuracy of your wording into question here. I guess I honestly just don't get it. How do you feel about working on it so that it can be more readily understood by a general audience?-- Atlantictire ( talk) 18:12, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Changed "subjective sensation" to "auditory sensation" Calling something a "subjective sensation" is a bit like calling something "food you can eat". All sensations are perceptual and therefor subjective. Also, subjectivity is discussed in depth in the second paragraph, so it's not like the reader isn't appraised of the subjectivity of pitch.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 04:59, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
"Variation of pitch is associated with musical melodies"
What are you driving at? I don't think "associated" is the word you want. Increased crack consumption is associated with higher crime rates, or four leaf clovers are associated with good luck. Associated is word you use when there's a correlation that's probably causal but you're not quite sure, or there's an association in terms of when there's one there's often the other. When there's melody there's definitely pitch, so these aren't quite the relationships you want to convey.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 15:09, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Following the earlier ASA definition, we define pitch as "that attribute of sensation whose variation is associated with musical melodies."
I restored Bill's version with the def'n from Plack. I can't tell from Plack whether he's quoting an ASA definition, or trying to go it one better. I don't see any other sources for this quote. It would be good to know what is the current official ASA definition, like we previously had quoted in the lead. Dicklyon ( talk) 17:52, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
I just checked the Plack book. On p.1 he quotes and discusses the ASA 1960 and ANSI 1994 definitions and some others, before giving his own, the one quoted above. We could say more from these two pages if anyone wants. Dicklyon ( talk) 23:16, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Since we're talking about pitch as it relates to melody here, can we use a musician's definition rather than an engineer's? The Harvard Dictionary of Music defines melody as a coherent succession of pitches. To me this is much preferable, because melody IS pitches. Sorry to keep piling on the analogies, but saying speech is associated with a variation of consonants and vowels just sounds idiotic.
Also, as Bill pointed out with his one note samba example, melody isn't necessarily a variation of pitches.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 19:30, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Also keep in mind that this article is a merge of pitch (music) with pitch (psychophysics) (see last non-redirect version), so it shouldn't be warped too far toward just being an article for musicians. It needs to cover the technical aspects of what pitch is, as well as how pitch regarded and used in music. Dicklyon ( talk) 21:46, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Ok, quickly
From the Wikipedia:No original research page you linked to:
Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources.
Policy: Reliably published tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources, especially when those sources contradict each other. Some tertiary sources are more reliable than others, and within any given tertiary source, some articles may be more reliable than others."
Sorry, but how is this a prohibition against basing an explanation of melody's relationship to pitch on the HDM? If anything it could be used to support it, as this is exactly the sort of situation for which Wikipedia condones the use of tertiary sources.
So? That's not why I cited it. Do you seriously think HDM has some arcane, non-standard definition of pitch in mind? Can you think of a definition of pitch that would disallow the HDM explanation of melody while sanctioning the ASA explanation? Do the explanations of pitch in the article do this?
Ok, but there's a hierarchy of importance. Do other musical grammars have a relationship to pitch as straightforward as melody's? I mean I guess you could start trying to explain harmony, but I think we're just trying to provide some illustrative examples here in order to orient the reader... not list everything in perpetuity throughout the universe comprised of pitches.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 02:01, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
I've lost track of what you guys are arguing about, but getting back to the question "when one is in conflict with the other, how do you decide which one to pick?" I repeat my answer: both. There no problem stating multiple definitions and points of view of what pitch is. Let's get down to specific proposals that don't choose one POV other the other. We don't need to decide whether musicians get to the have the upper hand here. Dicklyon ( talk) 02:41, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
---
When I was a kid I owned a pitch pipe. For those unfamiliar with this, it's a round harmonica-like thing with reeds tuned to the C scale; the one I had all the sharps, too. You blew into a hole (they were labeled e.g. A, A#, B etc) and you got the "pitch" of the reed in that hole. This is probably what you're trying to say:
I can't remember what C is pitched at, and didn't find it in the article, so I wrote Cxxx. Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 04:14, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Agreed. To your point see the quote below. You could probably get very technical and say that if a sound's Fourier transform is "higher" (its components weighted toward "higher" frequencies) compared to another sound's FT, the perception will be that it is "pitched higher" than the other sound. That may be true for "static" sounds, but not accurate enough because of the time-variation present in many sound-sequences, as this little example shows. Have you heard the auditory trick where the scale is played "up" and then, like M. C. Esher's men walking around the turret, the sound-sequence is back to the beginning? Clearly as the sounds go up the scale, the audio engineer has mixed in 1/2 the tone's frequency, more and more volume as the notes go higher, until we're back to the starting frequency. Thus it's certainly the case that harmonics foul up our perception of pitch, especially in a tone-sequence. Here's an interesting quote in the context of synesthesia; notice the word "vowel" and that "higher" is in quote-marks, too:
I, unfortunately, don't have any good sources re "perception of pitch" in non-synesthetes. It's an interesting topic, no? Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 14:17, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to get back to concrete proposals for what changes people think will improve the lead, and why. The discussion above is too long and difficult to follow. Dicklyon ( talk) 19:08, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
I don't see any conflict between the Plack and HDM definitions but I move their wording into quotes in the ref so we can use our wording to paraphrase. I'm still unsure about the ref 1 definition, since I don't know the context or exactly what it says, and since I don't have it and can't see it online. Please add a quote with some context we can see what they mean by this vacuous-sounding definition. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:09, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
In this diff in late 2006, User:ILike2BeAnonymous changed the wording "the psychological correlate of the fundamental frequency" to "the perceived fundamental frequency". Since 2008, the phrase "Pitch is the perceived fundamental frequency" has appeared in about five books (none before 2008). So we know someone is reading, and we ought to try harder to make what we say sensible. The old version appears only in one obscure 1981 item on Google books (actually says "Pitch is thought to be the psychological correlate of the fundamental frequency of an acoustic waveform"), but at least it makes sense. Dicklyon ( talk) 04:27, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
The old article pitch (psychophysics) started out with "To a good approximation the percieved pitch of a sine wave is directly related to the frequency of the sound," which is based on the malformed assumption that a sound generally has a frequency. I changed it in 2007 to Plack's "Pitch is the psychophysical attribute of sound whose variation is associated with musical melodies," and later in 2007 to "Pitch is the property of a sound that allows the construction of melodies," which lasted until the article was merged here in 2010. Those are meaningful and correct, I think. If we want to start with something even simpler, what would it be? the "perceived fundamental frequency" is an oxymoron. Dicklyon ( talk) 04:35, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
In many cases, when a sound is periodic or nearly so and has an identifiable F0 in the range that we can perceive pitch in, the perceived pitch, determined by matching to the pitch of a sine wave, will give a value pretty nearly equal to the F0 of the sound. In that sense, the F0 is closely associated with pitch, for those classes of sound. However, as I mentioned before, many sounds have a pitch but no identifiable F0, and many periodic sounds have a pitch that is very different from their F0. The concept of a "perceived F0" doesn't make sense; what we perceive is pitch. The general physical correlates of pitch remain an active area of research; that's why whole books, like Plack's, are devoted to it. Dicklyon ( talk) 16:35, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
I searched books for "pitch is a perceptual" and found several I liked better; I changed it to "Pitch is a perceptual attribute that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale" sourced to Klapuri and Davy, which is a source that's both musical and technical. Dicklyon ( talk) 16:46, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Ok, there is still some language that is unclear to me:
Earlier, you'd said something about matching sounds to sine waves. Could you go a little into what this process of matching sounds to sine waves entails. Forgive my ignorance, but does this mean you play someone a "sound" (like a note on a guitar) and then you play them a pure tone and ask if they heard the two sounds as having the same pitch?
By repetition rate you mean period, right? And then all sounds that aren't pure tones are sounds other then sine waves, correct? If both these things are true we might want to make that a little more explicit in the article.
Sorry to be such a pest, but so many of the articles I work on link to this page and to the frequency page expecting some kind of explanation of the relationship between the two. The frequency page is pretty mute on the issue, so that's why this is so important to me. Oh, and next time I'll definitely knock first!-- Atlantictire ( talk) 03:27, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
By reciprocal, you mean multiplicative inverse, right? I'll just link to that concept so that it's clear.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 17:14, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
I thought frequency was dependent on linear density, μ, and not voluminous density, ρ. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.225.203.115 ( talk) 02:09, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
What is meant by the "very nearly" in 'pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower", and are quantified as frequencies (cycles per second, or hertz), corresponding very nearly to the repetition rate of sound waves.' in the second paragraph?
It seems to be saying "frequencies" are different to "repetition rates" - in what way?
Or maybe it was intended to say that "pitch" corresponds "very nearly" to "frequency", while at the moment it says that one is "quantified as" the other.
I am unsure, so I have not changed it.
FrankSier ( talk) 22:03, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure how to go about clarifying the lead any further, without getting into too much elementary explanation. First sentence says it "represents the perceived fundamental frequency..." and in the second paragraph it says "pitch is not an objective physical property, but a subjective psychophysical attribute of sound." Then it says pitch is "quantified as frequencies (cycles per second, or hertz), by comparison with sine waves." (I've emphasized a couple of phrases there.)
@Woodstone: I am pretty sure that an electronically generated signal through a high-quality audio system with a good reference-grade transducer (e.g. speaker or earphone) can come as close to a pure sinewave as needed. I believe tuning forks put out vibration with few overtones, perhaps good enough for psychoacoustic measurements? __ Just plain Bill ( talk) 15:53, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
Rather than talk about it, I have taken the liberty or reworking the second paragraph in the lead. I have removed some detail and some refs. As I say above, the lead should summarize the article. Please feel free to include detail (e.g. sine wave vs. other waveforms) and refs in the body. Let me know what you think. -- Kvng ( talk) 17:01, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
In the section on "Perception of Pitch", just-noticeable difference is described as being approximately 4.3 cents (a cent being one-hundredth of a semitone), or about 0.36 Hz in the range 1 kHz to 2kHz. But one cent in that octave is about 0.82 Hz, so 4.3 cents would be 3.6 Hz, or ten times greater than what's stated. Either the 4.3 cents is too high by an order of magnitude, or the 0.36 Hz is too low by an order of magnitude. I'm inclined to think it's the latter (it seems incredible that an ordinary ear, or really any ear, could discern 0.4 Hz in that octave), but don't want to make the change unless it's known for sure which is the case. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the citation in question (Olson 1967); could someone take a looksee and verify that it's the latter? BrianTung ( talk) 00:28, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
I'm writing an article about a bird species and one of the sources I'm consulting says the following about its song:
I've got no idea of waht it means and I really don't know anything about acoustics, so I'd appreciate a simple non-technical explanation. Thanks! -- 186.108.175.201 ( talk) 15:12, 7 March 2011 (UTC)
We had a thorough discussion about the lead back in January. That resulted in the following:
The lead has continued to evolve since then and to my eye it is not improving further. I propose to restore the lead to the above. -- Kvng ( talk) 13:06, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
"the fundamental frequency definition and the definition about ordering notes on a scale are complimentary, so you don't need the equivocations. They're misleading."
Thanks everyone for your contributions. It looks like things are headed in the right direction. I've added a contribution of my own. I no longer feel like the the older revisions are better than the current. -- Kvng ( talk) 03:11, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
I know I'm tempting fate, but I've just switched the order of the first two sentences in the lead so that we first learn what pitch is, then what class it belongs to.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 02:04, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Does whoever added the fact about melody in the first paragraph of the lead want to step forward? Just in case anyone wants to challenge it, I'm not the person you need to speak with.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 04:35, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Also, could we give an example of a high-pitched sound and a low-pitched sound in the lead? We should allow for the possibility that someone might visit this page because they don't already know what pitch is, and I think examples may be useful to him or her.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 02:27, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
This section is quite long and cumbersome and could do with some subsections and wording adjustments. I'll begin tweaking it, and if there's anything I don't understand or think is redundant or irrelevant I'll post it to this section for clarification and comment.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 02:27, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
I think you need to slow down. You've gone from copy editing to a major and unilateral rewrite. You've changed sourced statements like "Pitches are sometimes quantified as frequencies (cycles per second, or hertz), by comparison with sine waves" to new versions that do not capture as well what the sources say. You've left references attached to other statements that you changed; did you check the sources to see if they support what you wrote?
Dicklyon (
talk)
04:00, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Ah ha. Sounds like you know a great deal about the physics of sound. Quite honestly, the meaning and relevance of that sentence are lost on me. Not trying to call the accuracy of your wording into question here. I guess I honestly just don't get it. How do you feel about working on it so that it can be more readily understood by a general audience?-- Atlantictire ( talk) 18:12, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Changed "subjective sensation" to "auditory sensation" Calling something a "subjective sensation" is a bit like calling something "food you can eat". All sensations are perceptual and therefor subjective. Also, subjectivity is discussed in depth in the second paragraph, so it's not like the reader isn't appraised of the subjectivity of pitch.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 04:59, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
"Variation of pitch is associated with musical melodies"
What are you driving at? I don't think "associated" is the word you want. Increased crack consumption is associated with higher crime rates, or four leaf clovers are associated with good luck. Associated is word you use when there's a correlation that's probably causal but you're not quite sure, or there's an association in terms of when there's one there's often the other. When there's melody there's definitely pitch, so these aren't quite the relationships you want to convey.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 15:09, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Following the earlier ASA definition, we define pitch as "that attribute of sensation whose variation is associated with musical melodies."
I restored Bill's version with the def'n from Plack. I can't tell from Plack whether he's quoting an ASA definition, or trying to go it one better. I don't see any other sources for this quote. It would be good to know what is the current official ASA definition, like we previously had quoted in the lead. Dicklyon ( talk) 17:52, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
I just checked the Plack book. On p.1 he quotes and discusses the ASA 1960 and ANSI 1994 definitions and some others, before giving his own, the one quoted above. We could say more from these two pages if anyone wants. Dicklyon ( talk) 23:16, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Since we're talking about pitch as it relates to melody here, can we use a musician's definition rather than an engineer's? The Harvard Dictionary of Music defines melody as a coherent succession of pitches. To me this is much preferable, because melody IS pitches. Sorry to keep piling on the analogies, but saying speech is associated with a variation of consonants and vowels just sounds idiotic.
Also, as Bill pointed out with his one note samba example, melody isn't necessarily a variation of pitches.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 19:30, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Also keep in mind that this article is a merge of pitch (music) with pitch (psychophysics) (see last non-redirect version), so it shouldn't be warped too far toward just being an article for musicians. It needs to cover the technical aspects of what pitch is, as well as how pitch regarded and used in music. Dicklyon ( talk) 21:46, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Ok, quickly
From the Wikipedia:No original research page you linked to:
Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources.
Policy: Reliably published tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources, especially when those sources contradict each other. Some tertiary sources are more reliable than others, and within any given tertiary source, some articles may be more reliable than others."
Sorry, but how is this a prohibition against basing an explanation of melody's relationship to pitch on the HDM? If anything it could be used to support it, as this is exactly the sort of situation for which Wikipedia condones the use of tertiary sources.
So? That's not why I cited it. Do you seriously think HDM has some arcane, non-standard definition of pitch in mind? Can you think of a definition of pitch that would disallow the HDM explanation of melody while sanctioning the ASA explanation? Do the explanations of pitch in the article do this?
Ok, but there's a hierarchy of importance. Do other musical grammars have a relationship to pitch as straightforward as melody's? I mean I guess you could start trying to explain harmony, but I think we're just trying to provide some illustrative examples here in order to orient the reader... not list everything in perpetuity throughout the universe comprised of pitches.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 02:01, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
I've lost track of what you guys are arguing about, but getting back to the question "when one is in conflict with the other, how do you decide which one to pick?" I repeat my answer: both. There no problem stating multiple definitions and points of view of what pitch is. Let's get down to specific proposals that don't choose one POV other the other. We don't need to decide whether musicians get to the have the upper hand here. Dicklyon ( talk) 02:41, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
---
When I was a kid I owned a pitch pipe. For those unfamiliar with this, it's a round harmonica-like thing with reeds tuned to the C scale; the one I had all the sharps, too. You blew into a hole (they were labeled e.g. A, A#, B etc) and you got the "pitch" of the reed in that hole. This is probably what you're trying to say:
I can't remember what C is pitched at, and didn't find it in the article, so I wrote Cxxx. Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 04:14, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
Agreed. To your point see the quote below. You could probably get very technical and say that if a sound's Fourier transform is "higher" (its components weighted toward "higher" frequencies) compared to another sound's FT, the perception will be that it is "pitched higher" than the other sound. That may be true for "static" sounds, but not accurate enough because of the time-variation present in many sound-sequences, as this little example shows. Have you heard the auditory trick where the scale is played "up" and then, like M. C. Esher's men walking around the turret, the sound-sequence is back to the beginning? Clearly as the sounds go up the scale, the audio engineer has mixed in 1/2 the tone's frequency, more and more volume as the notes go higher, until we're back to the starting frequency. Thus it's certainly the case that harmonics foul up our perception of pitch, especially in a tone-sequence. Here's an interesting quote in the context of synesthesia; notice the word "vowel" and that "higher" is in quote-marks, too:
I, unfortunately, don't have any good sources re "perception of pitch" in non-synesthetes. It's an interesting topic, no? Bill Wvbailey ( talk) 14:17, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to get back to concrete proposals for what changes people think will improve the lead, and why. The discussion above is too long and difficult to follow. Dicklyon ( talk) 19:08, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
I don't see any conflict between the Plack and HDM definitions but I move their wording into quotes in the ref so we can use our wording to paraphrase. I'm still unsure about the ref 1 definition, since I don't know the context or exactly what it says, and since I don't have it and can't see it online. Please add a quote with some context we can see what they mean by this vacuous-sounding definition. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:09, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
In this diff in late 2006, User:ILike2BeAnonymous changed the wording "the psychological correlate of the fundamental frequency" to "the perceived fundamental frequency". Since 2008, the phrase "Pitch is the perceived fundamental frequency" has appeared in about five books (none before 2008). So we know someone is reading, and we ought to try harder to make what we say sensible. The old version appears only in one obscure 1981 item on Google books (actually says "Pitch is thought to be the psychological correlate of the fundamental frequency of an acoustic waveform"), but at least it makes sense. Dicklyon ( talk) 04:27, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
The old article pitch (psychophysics) started out with "To a good approximation the percieved pitch of a sine wave is directly related to the frequency of the sound," which is based on the malformed assumption that a sound generally has a frequency. I changed it in 2007 to Plack's "Pitch is the psychophysical attribute of sound whose variation is associated with musical melodies," and later in 2007 to "Pitch is the property of a sound that allows the construction of melodies," which lasted until the article was merged here in 2010. Those are meaningful and correct, I think. If we want to start with something even simpler, what would it be? the "perceived fundamental frequency" is an oxymoron. Dicklyon ( talk) 04:35, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
In many cases, when a sound is periodic or nearly so and has an identifiable F0 in the range that we can perceive pitch in, the perceived pitch, determined by matching to the pitch of a sine wave, will give a value pretty nearly equal to the F0 of the sound. In that sense, the F0 is closely associated with pitch, for those classes of sound. However, as I mentioned before, many sounds have a pitch but no identifiable F0, and many periodic sounds have a pitch that is very different from their F0. The concept of a "perceived F0" doesn't make sense; what we perceive is pitch. The general physical correlates of pitch remain an active area of research; that's why whole books, like Plack's, are devoted to it. Dicklyon ( talk) 16:35, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
I searched books for "pitch is a perceptual" and found several I liked better; I changed it to "Pitch is a perceptual attribute that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale" sourced to Klapuri and Davy, which is a source that's both musical and technical. Dicklyon ( talk) 16:46, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
Ok, there is still some language that is unclear to me:
Earlier, you'd said something about matching sounds to sine waves. Could you go a little into what this process of matching sounds to sine waves entails. Forgive my ignorance, but does this mean you play someone a "sound" (like a note on a guitar) and then you play them a pure tone and ask if they heard the two sounds as having the same pitch?
By repetition rate you mean period, right? And then all sounds that aren't pure tones are sounds other then sine waves, correct? If both these things are true we might want to make that a little more explicit in the article.
Sorry to be such a pest, but so many of the articles I work on link to this page and to the frequency page expecting some kind of explanation of the relationship between the two. The frequency page is pretty mute on the issue, so that's why this is so important to me. Oh, and next time I'll definitely knock first!-- Atlantictire ( talk) 03:27, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
By reciprocal, you mean multiplicative inverse, right? I'll just link to that concept so that it's clear.-- Atlantictire ( talk) 17:14, 2 May 2011 (UTC)