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PITCH VS TONE: TWO MEANINGS OF TONE IN MUSIC
Potential Point of Confusion: The term tone has a couple of different meanings in music. Here in Chapter 3, tone and overtone refer to the musical sound sensations your brain processes when a string or membrane (such as your vocal folds) or column of air vibrates.
When you get to Chapter 4, the term tone will refer to something completely different, namely, the pitch distance between two notes.
If you don’t understand the distinction, you will get lost. And then Marshal McDillon will have to organize a search party to fetch you back from the wilderness. Which he doesn’t want to have to do because the whole search party might get lost, and horses aren’t much good at getting their bearings straight. And, of course, as in any Classic Western, global positioning systems haven’t been invented yet.
Irving Berlin inadvertently wrote a song about tone properties, called “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better),” a duet between Annie Oakley and Frank Butler, from the 1946 musical, Annie Get Your Gun. If you haven’t heard this excellent song, look up the details at www.GoldStandardSongList.com.