Finnish doesn't even have phonemic stress, so just trying to get what all the pitch accent shit in any language is about makes my head hurt.
vijayjohn wrote:in the context of music, this wouldn't seem to be a very useful distinction to make, and it would make sense that "pitch" and "tone" would be used interchangeably.
Well, technically, there could be situations where they aren't interchangeable, but it wouldn't really make sense to extend those rare situations to all musical contexts. When speaking of the "tone" of guitars or bass or whatever, it can refer to the quality of the sound rather than the pitch; for example, you could have a "low/thick" tone without referring to the actual tuning of the guitar or the notes played, even if most of the time a "thick" or "heavy" or whatever "tone" goes hand in hand with a lower tuning and thus a lower pitch. The same applies to vocals, too, although I don't think anyone would generally describe any kind of singing as having a "low tone" unless the pitch was low...?
When it comes to stuff like death metal growls, though, that's a whole another world of random words describing random shit that makes no sense half of the time (I mean, "toilet growl" makes perfect sense, but actually describing what a toilet growl is... well... yeah) and even more ridiculously, some of the terms used by electronic music artists and especially the general "community" are the stuff headaches are made of; in reference to synths or whatnot, "tone" can refer to the central pitch of a sound while "pitch" would refer to the detuning/harmonising/whatever pitch that varies, without implying any relation to the actual notes in a song, and tons of other terms are thrown around in ways I have no clue about.