Pitch = Rhythm

This just sounds like some graduate student's nonsense thesis that was accidentally published. I mean, WTF?

Originally Posted by flint-wwrr

This just sounds like some graduate student's nonsense thesis that was accidentally published. I mean, WTF?

Lol, it was a VERY good book. I learned a lot....(whether what I learned is actually useful or not is another story...) I would recommend it to any musician. Also, check out Victor Wooten on youtube. He plays bass. You might have seen his amazing "Amazing Grace" clip....

~Kal

Originally Posted by Keerakh Kal

So if pitches are rhythms, are rhythms pitches? If so, then when I play sixteenth notes on a table, I'm a playing an extremely low pitch? But what about the pitch of me actually hitting the table? Am I playing two notes at the same time? But if me hitting the table has a pitch, isn't that pitch a rhythm too?



~Kal

Christopher Dunn-Rankin already answered the first question.

Regarding the question of whether you are playing two pitches at the same time: Technically yes (as long as you hitting the table is more or less clearly pitched). It's actually a very slow form of granular synthesis what you are doing, which is one of the methods to generate sound electronically: You have extremely short sound fragments, so-called "grains", that are played in extremely rapid succession thus creating a new tone. The resulting sound has both qualities of the pitch(es) of the original grains and the speed at which the grains are repeated.

Well, I generally agree that it may often be pointless to do such comparisations as it goes a bit against how we hear stuff. Hitting a table 5 times a second may be a "pitch" but we won't hear it as such, because of the already mentioned limits of our ears, so it may seem like a rather academic question.

-However- this idea can become quite practical when dealing with electronic music, where you can create smooth transitions between audible, individual pulses and pitches. The border between extremely low pitches and fast pulses can be very interesting (and is, again, quite typical for pieces created with granular synthesis).

This is of course almost impossible to do on classical instruments, as no human player can generally play so fast tone repetitions that it sounds like a pitch. However there are certain instrumental techniques which deal with this border. One of the most common way of turning pitches into pulses in instrumental music is when two notes are so close to each other that they start to beat.

Assume a cello for example, which plays a double stop, starting on an unison and slowly sliding into a greater interval. You will then hear a slow beating that grows faster and faster till it vanishes, due to the frequency differences of both notes.

Another way to instrumentally show the dual nature of pitches and pulses would be things like fluttertonguing on wind instruments. Generally this will produce a "pulse" sound, although a very rapid one. But if you play an extremely low note (let's say on a trombone) with fluttertongue the frequency of the played pitch and the frequency of the fluttertongue won't be very far away from each other, so they'll influence each other and break the tone apart in curious ways, as an interference.

Even pieces like Ligeti's "Atmosphères" deal with this phenomenon, in a very abstract way: Ligeti had experimented in an electronic studio with tones that follow each other extremely fast and found that this created a sound colour that was entirely different from colours you get by mixing sounds statically. He called this "Movement colour". While he couldn't imitate this effect very well on single instruments (although pieces like the harpsichord piece "Continuum" come very close to crossing the border between pulses and continuous sounds), he could achieve it by having lots of different instruments play different rhythms at the same time, so that the resulting rhythm of -all- instruments would be an extremely fast succession of notes which again would create this "Movement colour" that is so typical for Ligeti. Interesting stuff.

Gardner -

Great insight. This concept is also shows itself in microtonal and some large extremely polyphonic compositions. For the latter, the reverse (pitch becomes a series of indistinct rhythmns ) can happen too wherein faced with such a large disparate array of pitches there really is not pitch but rather a tidal rhythmn (such as the sound of waves breaking upon the shore) -- examples would be some of the gigantic polyphonic pieces for 40 or more voices in the high rennaissance . The problem of course is listenability - notice this stuff isn't done too often (the next period in Western music where it starts to occur is with the very late Romantic pieces - the opening accompaniment of Gurrelieder is one example where pitch and rhythmn begin to meld - -and this border is crosseds with greater frequency starting in the 1950's and 60's - Ligeti's Requiem, some Stockhausen (like Gruppen), Penderecki (Threnody and some of his choral work at that time) and later to present day in electronic music). In sum, as has been said, rhythmn and pitch are equivalent but is perceptible only at the extremes of human perception. Of course, without electronic enhancement and amplification, its utility is very limited.

Rhythm are produced by pitches being held for various length of time.

So if I touched your arm several times an held the touch for various lengths of time that would be:
Pitch?
Not rhythm?

Pitch is all vibrations of air right? so there must be Rythms in the vibrations or else there is just a single Rhythmic pulse. Like a drum(not timpani). But if it is able to "ring" then it has a pitch. And the _-__-__-__-__-_ osolation(sp), dont you need two Crests of a wave to measure its distance? And that would mean two that come systematicly(sp) after each other? That sounds like rhythms to me. But Rhythm seems like it can't have pitch. Only because it is just a single pulse amd then it is over.

I had a ear training book that tryed to explain it.

Originally Posted by Christopher Dunn-Rankin

People find 4/4 drumbeats pleasing because it's creating the (very low) intervals of octave and fifth, if it's just quarter notes, and then if you add eighths, that's another fourth on top of it, making two full octaves.

Is there any research that verifies this? To me it sounds suspiciously like a dated bullshit excuse to consider European music superior to others. And before someone comes and says that it's okay to make up your own theories about this stuff, I'd like to point out that the claim that people find certain rhythms or meters pleasing because of certain acoustic principles is very much a testable (and falsifiable) scientific claim, probably falling in the realm of neurology and psychoacoustics. So I think asking for a reference is fully legitimate. That said, I would be pleased and interested if one is provided.

By the way, superimposing a 2 and 4 or 1 and 3 beat on 4/4 quavers would result in a very low octave, and adding eighths would be another octave on top. A fifth would have to be a triplet of some sort. If we have the 4/4 beat and add eighth notes and eighth-note triplets, you'll have the first four harmonics nicely represented, but I haven't heard that beat a lot in disco music. Leading me again to think the hypothesis is somewhat weakly constructed.

Good point. And if we'd even add the fifth harmonic (which is usually clearly audible in most instruments) we would even have to add quintuplets to these. While physically it can be said that there's no strict difference between a rhythmic pulse and tone, neurologically they are handled differently. So personally I'm very sceptical of theories that make a psychoacoustical link between rhythmic and harmonic concepts. ("Sceptical" doesn't mean I'm necessarily against it, just very careful.)

However, as I mentioned, it can be very interesting if you move towards the border of these phenomenons where they actually overlap.

Seems like this is just another system trying to perfect an art. It's not very impressive.