Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Its not that they don't have pitch, per se, it's that the nature of the sound they produce makes the concept of "pitch" kind of meaningless.
Except for a pure sine wave, every tone is going to have multiple harmonics over the fundamental which is what actually gives an instrument, even the human voice, its timbre.
Percussion instruments like cymbals and the snare drum create broad-spectrum noise. There's essentially so many frequencies that it's difficult for our brains to nail it down the fundamental pitch. It's also what helps us hear them over the rest of the ensemble.
Drums in general produce very short pulses of sound, which also makes it harder for the brain to tell what pitch it is. In harmonic analysis, any very short sound is actually broad-spectrum because it takes a ton of harmonics to produce a single sharp spike with rapid decay.
I highly recommend downloading a spectrum analyzer app on your phone to get an intuition for this. If you're on Android, I recommend Spectroid.
Just run it and watch the screen while you make different sounds, approach various sound sources, play music, or just talk or sing. If you can whistle, that also produces an interesting result. You can actually see the frequency of the power grid in the harmonics produced by electric motors and transformer coils which is personally really fucking cool.