Does pitch in music have anything to do with beats?

Answer 1

Pitch refers to the tonal frequency of the notes (middle C, for example, is a specific pitch), while beats refers to the rhythm at which the notes are played and their duration. Combining the two in a structured manner results in music. __________ However, pitch has everything to do with beats if you are talking about the overtone series and the phase relationship between any two notes. These beats are acoustical and they would be difficult to explain in detail. A quick explanation: Any musical tone is created by something vibrating. It might be a piano wire, a column of air in a Trumpet or Clarinet, the head of a drum or the elements of a speaker. These naturally vibrating things follow certain patterns. Understanding these patterns helps people to accurately tune acoustic instruments. Assume that you have two very accurate Tuning Forks. One vibrates at 440 cycles per second, and the other vibrates at 445 cycles per second. If you sound them together, you will hear a pulse, something like wawawa... and the frequency of the pulse will be 5 per second. A tuner would call these pulses beats. You would hear 5 beats per second. This is only the very beginning of the story.