Originally posted by: Morgoth
i believe there has been some confusion between the terms pitch and key.
pitch, as megha says, is simply the frequency of a single note. nothing more.
what arun is referring to is the "key" (a key signature of a full scale such as C+, C-, D+, D- etc.) which typically does not change in the song unless there are specific scale changes.
@ arun: interesting hypothesis on most indian songs being in the key of a "sa", but i don't think that's always true.
you could argue that a lot of indian songs are based in a major key (C+, D+, etc) considering that happier love songs tend to dominate.
Thanks for the informative post Morgoth. After today, I may not be able to check IF for a while. Would be good to continue this discussion via email. (Check your PMs.)
With BPM discussion out of the way, here are some more points on pitch. Regardless of whether a song is tuned to C, D or B etc, that is always your sa in Indian music. That's the shruthi of a song. So Shubha Mudgal might sing using a lower shruthi than Lata Mangeshkar and they can map to different keys on a piano but as far the song notation goes, they are both singing from the same notation but with their own "sa". Both Hindustani and Carnatic classical traditions follow this. Put it another way, if I take an Indian song and transpose it to SRGMPDN, there are multiple ways of transposing this Indian notation to sheet music depending on whether you want to anchor around C as your sa or some other key as your sa.
About pitch, my contention is just this. A pitch (frequency) of any note in a song does not change. Notes change but the pitch associated with the notes don't. Once a note (say ga) is in a particular pitch say D in a song, that cannot change midway in the composition. The ga always has to occur at D. So changing pitch while you sing that note means you are being besur. I hope that makes sense.
Finally, about pitch vs key, often they are used interchangeably. For example, if you use Audacity, it lets you change the "pitch" of the overall song (not the key). Not sure if there is a semantic difference between the two in their usage.
Curious to hear your thoughts on these. Feel free to continue this discussion without me here but when you do get a chance, ping me on email.
Arun
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