I am currently reading two books on music cognition as part of my studies: This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin, and Sweet Anticipation- Music and the Psychology of Expectation by David Huron.
According to Levitin, musical pitch is "a purely psychological construct, related both to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale...refers to the mental representation an organism has [of sound]." (p.15-22) This certainly makes sense seeing as our emotional response to music is based primarily on the melody, which is made up of many pitches. Without the psychological element, we're just talking about air molecules vibrating at certain frequencies.
Quiz time! Could you hear music in a vacuum?
Nope! Pitches produced at different frequencies cause surrounding air molecules to vibrate at the given frequency. Your ear drum in turn vibrates at that same frequency. We then use our inner ears and brain to analyze the way our ear drums vibrate and make connections. However, in a vacuum there are no air molecules so the tone "produced" would never make it to your ear. What if you were underwater??
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