What is it that makes the pitch similar in both Celtic and Arabic music, and why is this pitch unusual in other western music?
In: Culture
Some have explained in really good detail, the simple answer is they use notes that would be inbetween our notes.
Just to make it explicit since the top answers haven’t yet done so: “pitch” most commonly refers to the frequency of a note, i.e. 440Hz A. The pitch of a song then refers to the fundamental note of the scale used by the song, i.e. C major (the pitch is C and the scale is the major scale)
What you probably meant to ask about is “scale”, which refers to the relative distance between the notes. I’m not sure this applies to Celtic music, but certain Western scales have notes very close together in positions that are similar to Arabic scales, which can give the temporary impression that you are listening to Arabic music. Arabic scales, as others have explained, have a lot more notes in an Octave and therefore those notes are closer together.
(Note when I talk about distance and “close together” I’m referring to pitch).
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Ancient people from the middle east made it all the way to Ireland. Some people say the celtic peoples were middle eastern, while others say they just traded. For example: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/ancient-irish-had-middle-eastern-ancestry-study-reveals-1.2478780?mode=amp I’ve always assumed that accounts for the music similarities.
One of the earliest styles of Irish singing is Sean nós singing
Wiki
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean-n%C3%B3s_song
Example
This may help answer some of your questions
https://journalofmusic.com/focus/arab-influence-irish-traditional-music
For a comparison against a Yemeni female singer
I’m not exactly an expert, but nobody else seems to be answering here, so…
The only thing I can think of that really unites traditional Arabic music and Celtic folk music is that both heavily rely on drones–where a unharmonized melody plays over a sustained pedal, either a single tone or a perfect interval. Think bagpipes, where you get a lilting melody over that sustained bwahh sound.
But as far as pitch goes, they’re not very similar.
Celtic folk music developed alongside sacred church music since Christianity first hit the British isles, and as far as I know has used “western” scales for as long as musical notation has existed. Celtic folk music is more likely to use [modes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(music)) other than major or minor (in particular dorian and mixolydian), which gives it a less “classical” and more “folky” sound, but it’s still using western scales and tuning.
Arabic music, on the other hand, doesn’t use western scales, but [maqams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_maqam) that use intervals and tuning systems very different from the western 12-tone chromatic scale. They contain perfect fourths, fifths, and octaves like western scales, but everything else is very different.
Not quite sure of the similarities you are noticing in Celtic and Arabic music. However, I can answer how Arabic music is different than western music and it has to do with how we organize sound. In Western music we organize an octave (the distance between two pitches of halved or doubled wavelengths, like A 440 hz and A 880 hz) into 12 chromatic pitches. We then organize them into a series of half steps (one chromatic step away) and whole steps (two chromatic steps away) called a scale, most often a scale with 8 tones including the note an octave above the root note.
In arabic music, the octave is divided into what we call ‘quarter tones’. Meaning their octave instead of having 12 half steps, has 24 quarter steps. The results in having far more notes to work with and more combinations of notes to use to create melodies. Arabic scales known as maqams also utilize different sequences of quarter, half, and whole steps to create interesting tonal sequences which we hear as oddly chromatic and mysterious due to our much more rigid system of notation.
I hope this helps.
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