Full Transcript Below 👇

(00:00): Intro

Hey everyone, Joe, here. I wanted to go over this word "pitch". It's used in music a lot and often left undefined, which is exactly why we're here.

So to fully understand pitch, we need to do a quick review of how sound works. Sound is a form of energy produced by an object that is vibrating. There are a couple of aspects to an object that is vibrating. One is how fast or slowly it's vibrating. And then the other one is the intensity with which it's vibrating, meaning how much energy is being transferred in its vibration. Cool. Okay. So we don't have to worry about the second one. We're going to cover it in another video. 

(00:30): Pitch Defined

The first one, how fast or slow an object is vibrating. Well, this is what pitch is all about. Pitch is the relative "highness" or "lowness" of a sound.

[ plays a high note on the piano ]

That's relatively high...

[ plays a low note on the piano ]

..and that's relatively low.

That's relatively high [ spoken in a high-pitch voice ].

And that's relatively low [ spoken in a low-pitch voice ].

Does that make sense to you?

A mouse - right? - squeaking, that would be a relatively high pitch. Thunder [ makes low-pitch sound effect ] would be a relatively low pitch. The highness or lowness of that pitch is determined by how rapidly an object is vibrating that's producing a sound.

Example! Hold on!

(01:10): Example On Ukulele

A ukulele, right? If you see this string, when I pluck it, you can see the vibration, right? You can see the string vibrating, see how it kind of looks like a blur. There that's the string vibrating. Now it's a blur because it's vibrating so rapidly that we can't necessarily see all of the individual vibrations of the thing, but we can clearly see that something's going on. So we might call that a relatively high pitch, right? Uh, it's not the highest pitch that we can perceive with our ears, but it's up there. Now that object, the string, is vibrating relatively rapidly. Hence relatively high pitch.

If we had another string that you could see [ makes wave-like motion with arms ] it looked like that. Wow. I must look funny. If you had an object vibrating like that, where you could clearly see the vibration, it would be a relatively low pitch because it's vibrating slowly.

(02:09): Conclusion

And that's it. That's how pitch works. Relative highness or lowness of sound determined by how fast or slow an object is vibrating that's producing the sound. I hope that's helpful. If you have any questions or comments, throw them below in the comment section or send us DM. Okay. Signing off.