So if an A is 440hz, why does a piano playing an A sound different than a violin, a guitar, or someone’s voice making that same A 440 note? It’s obvious that the pitch is the same on each instrument but each instrument has a distinct sound. I’ve never heard an A on a piano and thought, is that a piano or a cello. Why can we distinguish between instruments?
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The occurrence of single, pure tones are rare in nature. Most sounds we hear are actually composed of the product of many sounds occurring together, at once, which can be likened to a chorus of sounds, not just a single voice. Usually the sound of this chorus is a jumble of randomly pitched voices, which we call ‘noise.’ Our senses are primevally conditioned to regard these with disdain or alarm. However, in some special occasions—like when musical instruments are generating them—the chorus consists of a numerically-ordered hierarchy of pitched voices, creating what is called a ‘harmonic series’, which we are primevally conditioned to desire and to derive pleasure from. These special sounds—*ordered* sounds, we call ‘musical’ because they please our senses. It’s how our brain works: we derive pleasure from musical sounds and are alarmed or discomforted by noise.
What the sounds made by different instruments all have in common is only the first, or loudest voice, called the ‘fundamental’ voice which *predominates*—and thus determines the pitch that we hear. That ‘voice’ is the same on all instruments. However what distinguishes the sounds from different instruments—what produces their distinctive sound character, is the effect of all the rest of the accompanying chorus of ‘voices’ –their distinctive loudnesses in the mix, and their distinctive decay rates, or how quickly they attenuate or persist within the sound.
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