C chord on stringed instruments

Question

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

Answer 1

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.