That’s because it doesn’t, your brain does
Speakers do the simplest thing possible and literally just vibrate. A recording being played literally just recreates a recorded vibration. It’s a tiny choreography that your ears are incredibly sensitive for.
All the fancy stuff happens in our brains, after our ears has split up the sound around us into different ranges of frequencies (you can think of the hairs in the inner ears as tuning forks). We learn to recognize which frequencies goes together, and then we learn how the frequencies from multiple sources can overlap, and we learn what it all means
The real crazy part is how something as simple as sound can carry so much information and how reliably our brains can tell it all apart and make sense of it
xthexder@l.sw0.com 16 hours ago
So there’s this thing called a Fourier series…
Basically any wave can be created by adding together individual frequencies, and with some fancy math it’s possible to go the other way with a Fourier transform and get how loud every frequency is (like is displayed in a spectrogram).
I think the real black magic is in how our ears and brains can decode the mess of information coming in and identify meaningful patterns.
Elgenzay@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
Image
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 15 hours ago
A nice related bookmark I have saved. There’s also interactive pert with a slider where you can draw a wave and then add more and more sinusoids to get closer and closer. And of course the square wave, with infinite sinusoids (theoretically).
www.jezzamon.com/fourier/