I (31m) am new to music and trying to understand how the human ear hears a chord as a combination of strings.
To avoid ambiguity I’ll focus on the C chord of a 5 string banjo tuned to G.
The individual strings for a C chord are played with E,C,G,E,G(high)
How do G and E combine to sound like C? My initial thought is constructive wave interference but that seems like it would make an F note, not C.
Please help a newbie 🙂
In: 1
The E and G don’t “combine” to sound like a C note. Rather, the three notes together make up a C chord (specifically C major). Chords are made by starting at the first note, called the root, and adding different notes at specific intervals. So, if C is number one, then adding the third and fifth notes (C-d-E-f-G-a-b) makes a C major chord. If you start at D, the third and fifth notes are F# and A, which makes a D major chord (whether a sharp or flat is involved has to do with the key, but that’s a another can of worms)
The E and G don’t “combine” to sound like a C note. Rather, the three notes together make up a C chord (specifically C major). Chords are made by starting at the first note, called the root, and adding different notes at specific intervals. So, if C is number one, then adding the third and fifth notes (C-d-E-f-G-a-b) makes a C major chord. If you start at D, the third and fifth notes are F# and A, which makes a D major chord (whether a sharp or flat is involved has to do with the key, but that’s a another can of worms)
As said below, what you get when two or more notes are played together is a Chord .
Chords are generally the changes in the song, between verses, choruses etc.
So when you play a C chord, you can play all the notes within it and they normally follow this pattern, imagine a piano (even better if you a real one of virtual one)
Start at C (if you don’t know this Google and come back!)
Now the white keys on a piano can be part of some cool patterns (the blacks can too but for the sake of This C chord).
As said below, what you get when two or more notes are played together is a Chord .
Chords are generally the changes in the song, between verses, choruses etc.
So when you play a C chord, you can play all the notes within it and they normally follow this pattern, imagine a piano (even better if you a real one of virtual one)
Start at C (if you don’t know this Google and come back!)
Now the white keys on a piano can be part of some cool patterns (the blacks can too but for the sake of This C chord).
Also G and E don’t combine to sound like F, that just isn’t how sound works. You hear all the notes together, they don’t combine into a thing. We just happen (through some accidents of physics and biology and culture) happen to like how C E and G played at the same time sound.
Also G and E don’t combine to sound like F, that just isn’t how sound works. You hear all the notes together, they don’t combine into a thing. We just happen (through some accidents of physics and biology and culture) happen to like how C E and G played at the same time sound.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re hearing, but the wave interference works very differently from your mental picture. If I play a C, I don’t get a pure C sine wave, but instead I get a bunch of harmonics. If you looked at the note say on a computer, what you’d see is a lot of the C you played, but also a C an octave above, a G a fifth above that, a C 2 octaves up, then the E above that, the next G and so on. These are called overtones or harmonics, and how loud each one is goes a long way towards making instruments sound the way they do.
In terms of actual frequency, there’s the frequency f of the note you played (the fundamental), and integer multiples of that, so 2f, 3f, 4f and so on. Each octave is a factor of 2 in frequency, so going up one octave is 2f, two octaves if 4f etc., which is why 3f is a G if the fundamental is a C.
If you were to play two different notes, if they happen to share an overtone, then they can reinforce each other, and that overtone can sound like a note. Similarly, you can get interference like you said, which tends to produce the sum and difference of the two frequencies. A G is 3/2 of a C, and an E is 4/3 of a C. I don’t think you can combine those to get a C, so you’re probably hearing something else, but this is the basic idea of how frequencies combine.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re hearing, but the wave interference works very differently from your mental picture. If I play a C, I don’t get a pure C sine wave, but instead I get a bunch of harmonics. If you looked at the note say on a computer, what you’d see is a lot of the C you played, but also a C an octave above, a G a fifth above that, a C 2 octaves up, then the E above that, the next G and so on. These are called overtones or harmonics, and how loud each one is goes a long way towards making instruments sound the way they do.
In terms of actual frequency, there’s the frequency f of the note you played (the fundamental), and integer multiples of that, so 2f, 3f, 4f and so on. Each octave is a factor of 2 in frequency, so going up one octave is 2f, two octaves if 4f etc., which is why 3f is a G if the fundamental is a C.
If you were to play two different notes, if they happen to share an overtone, then they can reinforce each other, and that overtone can sound like a note. Similarly, you can get interference like you said, which tends to produce the sum and difference of the two frequencies. A G is 3/2 of a C, and an E is 4/3 of a C. I don’t think you can combine those to get a C, so you’re probably hearing something else, but this is the basic idea of how frequencies combine.
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