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…
psycotica0@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Yeah! The “timbre” (which despite how it looks is said “tamber”) of an instrument is its audio “profile”. It’s what makes a piano different than a flute, or on a more subtle level makes one piano slightly different from another.
But here’s the nuts part: what makes up the timbre of an instrument is a bunch of different resonating bits all resonating together. Essentially the reason a flute sounds like a flute is because it comes “pre-loaded” with a boatload of simple waveforms already added together. When you play a note on one, you get the main pitch you’re playing, but the instrument’s body and your breath all also produce a whack-ton of side tones all playing at the same time. And like a fingerprint, our ear/brain hears all these bits start and stop together and says “that’s a flute”.
So it’s the same process, really: simple bits adding together. But “flute sound” isn’t the atom. It’s made up of a bunch of simple waves already added together, which then gets added to the other sounds that sound like pianos or guitars, which produces the final mix.
I don’t know if you’ll get anything out of it, but you could look up videos of a “modular synth” setting up a trumpet sound or something. These devices have simple electronic tone generators, but by layering them and plugging them into each other, and using effects and the like, they can start to mimic the timbre of a trumpet or whatever. By essentially adding together the “key bits” of the harmonics (these other waves) they can start to approach the feeling of a trumpet sound, but just with simple, raw, parts.
stelelor@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
So it’s not the record or the CD or whatever that is magic. It’s our brains. Holy shit that is so cool. Thank you for explaining it so well!
psycotica0@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Yeah! It’s dope. With this new understanding I’ll circle back around. In an indirect sense the groove of a record represents how far our eardrum should be from its “silent resting position” over time. That’s it. The brain is what takes that complicated signal that varies over time and makes something it recognizes out of it.
And then the information encoded on a CD, or magnetic tape, or in a compressed audio file is just the same thing: distance of eardrum from neutral over time.
Oh, and stereo and surround sound and all that is just different audio tracks that play out of different speakers at a synchronized time. Again, it’s our brain that notices it hears a flute in the left ear very slightly before it hears it in the right ear and thus feels like that means there’s a flute to our left. But there’s nothing “flute left” about either individual signal, they’re just different audio that we detected a slight difference in from ear to ear.