Unpitched percussion instrument

Unpitched percussion is typically used to maintain a rhythm or to provide accents, and its sounds are unrelated to the melody and harmony of the music.

A common and typical example of an unpitched instrument is the snare drum, which is perceived as unpitched for three reasons: The snare drum illustrates the three main ways in which a sound can be perceived as indeterminate in pitch: In practice, two or all of these mechanisms are frequently in effect in producing the sensation of an instrument being unpitched, but any one can be sufficient.

More radically, pitched instruments can be used to produce unpitched sounds, for example a prepared piano, or the golpe technique of flamenco music.

Many folk instruments and world music instruments are tuned to match the pitch of a particular degree of the scale of the music, including: These harmonic relationships may or may not be understood by the players themselves, but are consistently produced by skilled performers within the tradition,[citation needed] and this skill in tuning is passed on to their students.

Instruments regularly used both as pitched and as unpitched percussion include many types of bells.

A pair of timbales , two cowbells , a jam block and a cymbal all in use as unpitched percussion
Three instruments on the spectrum between pitched and unpitched: whistle , woodblocks , crotales Play ⓘ
Andrea Neumann 's prepared piano , Goethe-Institut , Boston, 2010, showing a dinner knife, a dinner fork, a piece of felt and a piece of cardboard interfering with the normal movement of the strings.
The tabla , left, is tuned to the tonic , dominant or subdominant of the soloist's key and thus complements the melody . Its drum head is reinforced at the centre to reduce inharmonic overtones .
The cowbell is most often used as unpitched percussion, but here is a pitched set