Definite and Indefinite Pitch
Not all musical instruments make notes with a clear pitch; unpitched percussion instruments are a class of percussion instruments that do not have a particular pitch. A sound or note of definite pitch is one of which it is possible or relatively easy to discern the pitch. Sounds with definite pitch have harmonic frequency spectra or close to harmonic spectra.
A sound generated on any instrument produces many modes of vibration occurring simultaneously. A listener hears numerous frequencies at once. The vibration that has the slowest rate is called the fundamental frequency, the other frequencies are overtones. An important class of overtones is formed by the harmonics, which have frequencies of integer multiples of the fundamental. Whether or not the higher frequencies are integer multiples, they are collectively called the partials, referring to the different parts that make up the total spectrum.
A sound or note of indefinite pitch is one of which it is impossible or relatively difficult to discern a pitch. Sounds with indefinite pitch do not have harmonic spectra or have altered harmonic spectra a characteristic known as inharmonicity.
It is still possible for two sounds of indefinite pitch to clearly be higher or lower than one another, for instance, a snare drum invariably sounds higher in pitch than a bass drum, though both have indefinite pitch, because its sound contains higher frequencies. In other words, it is possible and often easy to roughly discern the relative pitches of two sounds of indefinite pitch, but any given sound of indefinite pitch does not neatly correspond to a given definite pitch. A special type of pitch often occurs in free nature when the sound of a sound source reaches the ear of an observer directly and also after being reflected against a sound-reflecting surface. This phenomenon is called repetition pitch, because the addition of a true repetition of the original sound to itself is the basic prerequisite.
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