Need software that measures pitch

[hurleyan]

I was wondering if you knew any software that measures pitch. My project is how the temperature of water affects pitch when using wine glasses for the medium. I was wondering if there were any free or inexpensive software programs that would measure the pitch that is given off.
Thanks,
hurleyan

[deleted-71417]

Hi,

If you look at this Science Buddies project:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p040.shtml

you will find a link to free sound analysis software.

Best regards,


Barrett L Tomlinson

[hurleyan]

Thank you, but that isn't exactly what I was looking for. I really need an oscilloscope, but one that will just give me the pitch of the sound from the wine glass. If nothing like that exists and all of the oscilloscopes would only show waveforms, then I need a way to analize that and make it into a pitch. Is there some way to convert waves into pitch (Hz) that can be accomplished with a mathematical equation or something else simple like that?

[deleted-71712]

Hi hurleyan,

Pitch is very closely related to frequency:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_%28music%29 (Wikipedia, so you might want to look up some of the references listed -- some of them look pretty interesting)

Pitch is actually defined as the perceived quantity (I didn't know that! but I'm not a musician). Since frequency is something that can be measured objectively and you're planning to use software rather than surveying lots of people with an ear for music, you might consider wording your hypothesis in terms of frequency instead of pitch.

Frequency is absolutely something you can calculate from a waveform: it's just the number of cycles per unit time. If the peaks on the oscilloscope are twice as close together, the frequency is twice as high. Some of these resources might help:

http://www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/schools/index1.htm
http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/acoustics/frequency.htm
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/waves/u10l2e.cfm

... and you can also try putting key terms that they identify into a search engine.

Amanda

[rmarz]

hurleyan - I have used Audacity for many years for recording and editing, so I thought I'd try to see how it uses the analysis tool. I took a 1 kHz test track that was on You-Tube (see link below) and recorded it on Audacity. Using the 'Plot Spectrum' command under the Analyze tab it clearly shows the major frequency at 996 Hz, but with many harmonics at higher frequencies (about every 1 kHz from 4 kHz to over 20 kHz). Interesting capability. I don't know how pure the You-Tube track was, or how accurate the Audacity measurement was, but maybe this is useful for your experiment. Attached also is a screen shot of the spectrum analyzer of the 1 kHz tone. Good luck.

Rick Marz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7D1f6U6TpU

Test Frequency.pdf

(10.92 KiB) Downloaded 319 times

[hurleyan]

Thank You!!! When you said "major frequency", did you mean the frequency at the loudest point? That was what I thought it would be, but I wasn't really sure!

hurleyan

[rmarz]

hurleyan - Yes, the main frequency of this sample was said to be 1 kHz, the Audacity measurement was 996 Hz. Pretty close for relative measurements. As you can see on the spectrum plot, the 996 Hz note was measured as having an amplitude of -7.1 db, while the harmonics were in the order of -55 db. Because the decibel scale is a logarithmic scale, the actual amplitude of the harmonics are a very small percentage of the major frequency. For example, if the harmonics were -50 db below the reference frequency power, their power would be only .00001 of the reference. This would be considered pretty meaningless if you were only interested in the 996 Hz tone.

Here is a Wikipedia reference to the decibel.

Rick Marz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel

[hurleyan]

This clears everything up!!! I was starting to freak out about my project. I was starting to look at different asoftware programs. Thanks Again!!!
hurleyan