Pitch

A shrill or piercing sound is also called a high-pitch sound.

We use one more term for shrillness that is pitch. Shriller the sound higher the pitch. For e.g. sound of buffalo and of goat. Goat’s sound is shriller than buffalo’s sound. So, we can say that the goat has a high pitched voice and buffalo has a low pitched voice.

Below is a video in which you can see the difference between a less shrill and a more shrill sound.

Video 2.2: Straw flute

We saw that sound is vibrations. The number of times a particle/object vibrates in a second is called frequency. If it vibratesmore number of times in a given time, we say that its frequency is higher. Frequency of vibrations decide the pitch of the sound. Higher the frequency higher the pitch, lower the frequency lower the pitch.

For further exploration:

What is the frequency of the rotation of ceiling fan?

As a ceiling fan speeds up, beyond a point we are not able to see its blades. This is a limitation of our eyes - we can't see things that move too quickly. The sound vibrations also occur too rapidly for us to observe them. For e.g. if we look at a speaker (watch the video in 4.1), we can see that it vibrates but we are not able to count the number of times it vibrates in a given time.

[Contributed by administrator on 14. März 2018 22:59:30]

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2.2 Pitch

Pitch