Take it back. How does the vibrating air equate to all that? It’s not like there’s a drums bit of air and a vocals bit of air - the vibration is all smushed together. Your brain separates it back out again. That’s why it can take training to separately hear some bits of music, or why you can’t usually pick out individual voices in a choir.
Comment on Feeling that groove
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 11 hours agoHow does it seem like multiple sounds come through at the same time though? Say drums and vocals and a guitar, all at once. How does one groove equate to all of that?
FishFace@piefed.social 1 hour ago
SirHery@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Well if you put multiple waveforms above eachother the form on single waveform.(They all occupie the same space,in this case air, so they can’t be “separate”). This waveform is then recorded and remastered and whatnot. But basically the waves you can see on the vinyl are the “schape” they will have in the air.
olafurp@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
That’s the neat part, the brain does that using some black magic. You just have to add all the sounds individual waves together and the brain deciphers it.
Ephera@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
Yeah, we just have two ear canals. Stereo is basically all your brain will get.
olafurp@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
It’s true that the ears receive stereo input, but brain postprocesses it to make surround sound. It uses the time difference from sound hitting your right and left ear to do some black magic and figure out at which angle the sound is coming from.
Jerkface@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
You can add the waveforms together mathematically. Like if you go into a graphing calculator and plot a sine at 220 hz that’s an A note. Then add two more at 261(ish) and 329, baby you got yourself an A minor cookin’. That’s also what the groove would look like.
ytg@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
264 and 330 (exactly) if you want to justly tune it
ramenshaman@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
That part still kinda mystifies me. I understand that it’s a single waveform and you can just add together all the different waveforms of each instrument but it still blows my mind. Kinda like I sort of understand magnets but it still seems like magic.
With vinyl records it’s pretty cool how it can do right and left channels. The right channel vibrates diagonally in one direction and the left channel vibrates diagonally in the other direction.
psycotica0@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
Highly basic answer, let’s say the strength of the vocals wave over time is:
5, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4
And drums is:
4, 0, 2, 0, 4, 0, 2, 3
Then you add them together for each time slice and get:
9, 4, 5, 2, 7, 4, 7, 7
And you put that on a record, or out to a speaker, and our ears are able to break that up into the two parts when it hears it. This is the same as when two things are in the room making sound, there may be two sources, but my ear only has one hole, and that hole has one eardrum behind it. The different sounds just add their powers together and hit my ear as one mixed wave.
Alternative answer: magic
gigachad@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
Okay, I see this is very simplified, but an instrument consists of more than a strength? Given how many different instruments and voices exist - how many different individual waveforms exist? A flute should have another waveform than a saxophone and my voice is different to that one of your mother.
autriyo@feddit.org 6 hours ago
In theory an infinite amount of different waveforms. But practically speaking, no one would be able to distinguish them by ear, and even oscilloscopes have limited resolution.
Music is super complex and can’t even be described by a single or a few waveforms, unless it’s very simple. Another simplified way to explain all the sounds of music fitting on one “waveform” is to imagine the high frequency stuff happening in between the low frequency stuff. And usually the different instruments and voices don’t happen all at once, they happen slightly one after another, or in sync but intentionally so they affect each other the “right” way. Whatever the “right” way is…
davidagain@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Definitely, but you only ever perceive all that because of the one-dimenaional way your eardrums vibrate, and they vibrate because the air next to them vibrates. If we make the air next to your eardrums vibrate in the same pattern they did when the band were performing, you will hear and perceive the same sound as the band made.
You should be aware that an amplified band is only ever making sound at you through a bunch of speakers whose only function is to vibrate air in a one dimensional pattern.
Separating that all out into different instruments and people and timbres etc is the clever bit, and your brain does that, not the speaker, and you largely learned it as a child.