i was thinking a couple weeks ago, would it be possible to take all the noises in any setting (such as in the woods, in an office, or on the road, etc.) and determine all their pitches? has anyone other than me ever thought of/tried to do this?
Why on earth would anyone want to do this? In any case, it is not really possible. If you define “pitch” as the fundamental frequency of any sound then you need a pure sound with one basic, fundamental frequency. The noise of the breeze through the leaves or the sound of a waterfall have no “pitch” because they have their sound spread all over the frequency spectrum. These are extreme cases but many other sounds have also a mixture of several frequencies. Only relatively simple sounds have a single fundamental frequency. For example, the pitch of a piano string is very clearly its fundamental frequency but there is no such thing as the pitch of a piano as a whole.
Right. You could, in theory find the fundamental frequency of almost any noise, but the thing is it makes more sense for some noises than others. A ringing wine glass has a pretty clear fundamental frequency. But shuffling papers has a much less clear fundamental note – you could find one, but it doesn’t really stand out from any other note present in the shuffling sound.