Re: Pitch & Timbre

On Sat, 09 Jun 2007 12:49:05 GMT, Ron Hardin <rhhardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Padraic Brown wrote:
Is there a different method of pitch detection? Pitch is pitch
regardless of who sings or plays the note. Perhaps what you're talking
about is more on the timbre side.

Pitch isn't just pitch, a possibly vital point. A flute puts out energy at
its pitch frequency. A voice does not.

That means that the mechanism that hears it is different.

Why should that be the case? It's your ear and its physiological bits
that do the physical work of hearing. Your problem might be one of the
brain's _interpretation_ of what the ear is hearing. That's another
matter.

Sound is simply compressed air arriving in waves that bounce off the
t.m. which in turn vibrate the ossicles and set up waves in the fluid
of the inner ear which stimulate the hairs; the movement of the hairs
trigger nerves to send impulses to the brain. Sound's pitch is
determined by the energy in the wave. The brain does some kind of
weird magick to make sense out of that (and I suspect this is where
your question will be answered). There's nothing magical per se about
the human voice v. a flute with regard to the mechanism of hearing. We
were hearing things long before there were flutes and long before
there were human languages. Even before there were humans, so there's
no physiological / evolutionary reason for us to be hearing flutes and
voices by two different mechanisms.

Padraic

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