— A very short commentary
Most western musical instruments are designed to produce relatively simple and coherent tone qualities. In orchestral instruments, typical timbres feature a strong fundamental dominating the sound, with an overlay of harmonic overtones emphasizing the lower harmonics more than the higher. This sort of timbre has clear and unambiguous pitch; the ear effortlessly recognizes the notes it’s hearing even in dense musical contexts. With instruments made this way you can play harmonically sophisticated music, from pieces with extended jazz chording to intellectualized adventures in academic music, confident that the pitch information will come through unambiguously.
The situation is different with other sorts of timbres. Think of tones that have lots of prominent inharmonic overtones or strong noise components; think of sounds in which prominent overtones are conspicuously stronger than the presumed fundamental. For these, while the sound might be intriguing and appealing, the pitch-sense tends to be more ambiguous. In uncluttered musical contexts it might be possible to recognize pitches in such sounds and follow a melody, but in crowded or harmonically complex contexts — well, good luck: the sense of pitch may tend to get lost; the ear might fail to follow. The surrounding sounds from other instruments may seem to bury the fundamental, and the ear may inadvertently take to tracking one of the prominent overtones instead – an effect which can be particularly odd if that overtone happens to be some remote inharmonic frequency scarcely related to the intended pitch. Or the tone which in isolation was colorful and satisfying may be reduced to unpitched scratch or rumble. Even if you love the idea of unpitched sound, the richness and subtleties of the sounds that someone worked hard to find may be lost.
For people interested in experimental musical instruments, richly inharmonic tone qualities are often central to the work. If you want to explore something new and distinctive, it’s often these oddball sounds that are most promising, since familiar harmonic tone qualities are already well represented among the standard instruments. A lot of the fun and adventure lies in those exotic inharmonic sounds! This poses a question when it comes to composing for or improvising with such instruments: do you deliberately simplify and declutter the music to reveal the richness and subtlety of the instrument’s voice, or do you give reign to denser and more complex composerly ideas that risk burying the character of the instrument?
For more notes on the varieties of harmonic and inharmonic tone timbres, see here, here, and here.