Answer: when the wave encounters something, it can bounce (reflection) or be bent (refraction). In fact, you can "trap" waves by making them bounce back and forth between two or more surfaces. Musical instruments take advantage of this; they produce pitches by trapping sound waves.
Explanation: Any bunch of sound waves will produce some sort of noise. But to be a tone - a sound with a particular pitch - a group of sound waves has to be very regular, all exactly the same distance apart. That's why we can talk about the frequency and wavelength of tones.