Talk:Pure tone

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Frequencies of machine are recoreded in 1/3 rd octave band - what is the advantage and to avoid pure nearest dB criterias are selected - reasons — Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.18.61.229 (talk) 22:08, 30 January 2007‎

This article should be merged with sine wave.
It has no good reason to exist. Does Wikipedia need an article for every adjective combined with every noun? How about one for Chocolate ice cream? (If that link isn't red after I hit Save page, I'm gonna scream.) 70.109.178.133 (talk) 01:52, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
 * UNBELIEVABLE! How about Thick-sliced bacon? 70.109.178.133 (talk) 01:53, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Merge
This article should be merged with musical tone, standard test tone, reference tone, and signal tone. Some are stubs that are incapable of being expanded, some are unclear, some overlap other articles. Hyacinth (talk) 08:34, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

This article is very important
''For now I need to find more citations. this will be a work in progress.''

While this article may seem irrelevant, let us not be so hasty to move it. In my opinion, Musical Tone is a subject that has been a topic of extreme importance since the first conception of the different forms of Western music. Musical tone is also very important to classical music and baroque composers alike. Many composers have contributed large volumes of text on this subject. It is surprising to me this article is as short as it is seeing the vast text that exists out there on musical tone. In fact I own a book that discusses this subject and I will reference to it here later today.

Another important relevance to point out is that the enhancements of Musical tone through different woods and designs has been the primary goal for many professional luthiers when constructing an instrument. There are also larger volumes of text on this subject as well. Antonio Stradivari is well known for his expertise on the matter and there is also written text on his instrument designs for musical tone. I will try to find more resources to cite on both these points today when time permits.

Again I am surprised there is not more on this subject in the article. Looks like I have a job to do! yay! This is just the article I was looking for. Hopefully I can help. --Xavier (talk) 15:36, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Sine wave
Looking at the history of the page it looks like a similar merge has been proposed in the past until it was merged with Musical tone, from which I split it back again last year. I would like to argue that while pure tones are, physically, acoustic sine waves, the latter is a broader category: sine waves are also considered in other domains beyond acoustics. Pure tones have particular importance in acoustic for a number of reasons. First, in the history of acoustics, it has been particularly challenging to just produce pure tones. Many famous scientists are credited for this, and this history should be listed on this page... I had intended to do this, but haven't found the time to do so yet. And second, pure tones have a particular role in hearing. They were (and still are) used to discover basic properties of the auditory system, and are still used today for the clinial evaluation of hearing abilities. For all these reasons, I actually think that pure tones deserve a separate page. In some ways, what we should be aiming for is bit something like the page on Primary color. This is clearly not what we have now... so perhaps we should mark it as a stub. But I think that keeping it separate is a better incentive for contributors to complete the page that if it is a subsection of Sine wave. – egaudrain (talk) 15:21, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Why can't this concept be covered in a section of musical tone? fgnievinski (talk) 22:08, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Because pure tones are not musical tones. The ANSI Acoustics Terminology (S1.1-1994) has separate definitions for "pure tone" (3.40 and 13.02), "tone" (13.01) and "complex tone" (13.03) (which is what would correspond best to a musical tone). I think it would be confusing to merge them. In my experience, this would feed directly into a common confusion between frequency (of a pure tone), fundamental frequency and pitch. I've met sound engineers who thought they could suppress particular musical tones by adjusting a slider on their EQ... From talking with students, I understand that the confusion comes from the fact that, (1) when we teach linear acoustics, we can consider only one frequency at a time thanks to the Fourier decomposition; and (2) that the pitch of a (complex) tone can be equated to that of a pure tone in a psychoacoustical experiment, and that we use the frequency of the corresponding pure tone to characterise the pitch percept. Can you elaborate on the reasons motivating your desire to merge? – egaudrain (talk) 10:19, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Could you source your assertion that a pure tone is not a pure musical tone? The article on musical tone already mentions complex and pure, suggesting them as special cases of the more general musical tone. If you insist on not calling them pure musical tone and complex musical tone, there there should be a new article on tone (acoustics) separate from tone (music). fgnievinski (talk) 16:54, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Apologies in advance for the wordy response... ANSI Standard (S1.1-1994) Acoustic Terminology has two definitions for pure tone. The first one is in the General section, and it basically describes a sine wave (in the context of acoustics). The second one is in the section Musical Acoustics, as "simple tone; pure tone". There it also has two definitions: (a) one that equates to sine wave again, and (b) one that relates it to perception: a (musical) pure tone is a tone that elicits a single pitch. Merriam Webster agrees with this second definition and calls it a "musical tone." However, the Collins dictionary follows definition (1) and makes no mention of music. Most other definitions I found on the internet seem to match that latter one. I think my reluctance to linking it to music comes from the fact that the frequencies of musical tones are generally governed by a system. For instance, in Western music, musical tone frequencies are expected to follow either the Equal temperament scale, or the Just intonation scale, or another similar scale. In other words, frequencies are constrained. A musical tone can then be "off tune" if its fundamental frequency does not belong to the system. But I do not think that a pure tone can be "off tune" per se. In fact, the pure tones that are standardly used for tonal audiometry have frequencies that are not aligned with any of the Western music systems. But I'm ready to admit that I haven't found a clearly articulated source that supports my point of view. I had a look at the Britannica article on musical sound and the article is plagued with the sort of confusion I was referring to in my earlier response. For instance, in this figure, they call "overtones" a series of notes on a staff. But if a piano (or any other instrument) was to play the music that is written, each individual note would have its own series of overtones... Now I agree that pure tones, complex tones, musical tones have a lot in common, and we could have a top page called Tone (sound) that has a subsection for musical tone and a subsection for pure tone. Note that there is already a Tone page... that has a ton of links, including one to Tone (musical instrument)... (I'm not so sure there, what the rational is behind that page)... but I also notice that there is none that seems to describe a "tone" as a step in a musical scale. So yes... I'm all for re-organising all this in a way that makes a bit more sense... Shouldn't we move the discussion to that page then? – egaudrain (talk) 19:32, 10 June 2019 (UTC)