0

A friend bought me a replica trench whistle during the recent First World War Centenary. I'm hoping to use it as the basis for a scale or harmonic structure for a piece of music I'm working on.

When blown, it makes a dissonant tone which sounds to me like a combination of two pitches. Can anyone tell me what pitch(es) are sounding? There's a video of it here.

S. Imp
  • 494
  • 3
  • 13
  • 1
    It's a Bb, but if you're working on some music, surely you could figure that out. There's a faint overtone, maybe c. – Tim Jun 28 '19 at 15:22
  • 1
    I have attempted myself to winnow out the two pitches in there, but the interval I came up with isn't nearly as dissonant as the whistle seems, so I was looking for other people's input -- and didn't want to bias the responses. Very glad to see you say Bb, but my other note is different (but not very different). – S. Imp Jun 28 '19 at 15:25
  • 2
    This seems to be essentially a transcription request, which is off topic. – Todd Wilcox Jun 28 '19 at 18:21
  • 1
    @ToddWilcox respectfully, I disagree. It's about the nature of the instrument. – S. Imp Jun 28 '19 at 19:43
  • Without question, the most irritating aspect of this forum is the tendency to shut down perfectly reasonable questions as 'off-topic.' For the life of me, I'll never understand why transcription requests are off-topic on a music forum. When people are trying to learn, studying existing works is probably the single most powerful tool. – S. Imp Jul 17 '19 at 16:39

1 Answers1

2

enter image description here

This is a spectrogram view from Audacity, zoomed in to the fundamental (there are some overtones too). You can see the pitches changing over time (possibly as the air pressure varies?) - which is how I hear it too.

In the last quarter of the sound, The strongest frequencies look to be around Bb6 (~ 1865 Hz) and B6 (~ 1975 Hz). I'm going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies - obviously other reference pitches are possible.

Earlier in the sound, your Bb seems a little sharper, and your B a little flatter.

There may be a quieter component around C as well - I can't tell if that's real or just an artefact.

Нет войне
  • 45,993
  • 3
  • 78
  • 157