How do unpitched percussion instruments not have a pitch and how does whatever noise they produce not potentially create dissonance with the music they complement?
Surely if you measured their sound they would have a pitch technically...
You are viewing a single comment
What the others wrote is already pretty good. An interesting observation I made in this regard: If you take a white noise sample and cut it really short, it sounds quite a bit like a snare drum.
That's kind of the level of randomness you can expect from various unpitched percussion instruments. They don't just have one tone, or the tone from multiple octaves layered on top of each other, like pitched instruments typically have.
Rather they're all over the place, with many tones layered on top of each other, and those tones change rapidly, too. So, it kind of has many pitches and therefore not really any particular one either.
I've noticed that about the snare lol. That white noise also sounds like rain and certain forcefully rushing water
In fact, many old games used white noise for snares