This paper focuses on the notion of contrast: how contrast has been defined in the literature, how contrast is realised in natural language, how contrast is related to pitch accent. One pitch accent seems to have an inherent ability to express contrast: the fall-rise. The fall-rise accent plays a key role in the discussions of contrastive topics - and partly foci - in languages as different as English, German, Hungarian and Korean. In the present paper, the author show that - whereas all pitch-accents can be used to signal contrast, depending on the relevant context - the fall-rise may induce contrast also in cases where there is no sign in the context that contrast is intended. The fall-rise itself seems to create an illusion of a given closed set to which the accented constituent belongs. This, in turn, induces an implicit reference to alternatives, and thereby contrast, within the given set.