Electronics are becoming ever more prevalent in my uni course (I’m doing sound engineering). Knowing how your own equipment works and stuff is integral but what is a capacitor. I failed physics in school almost. What does it do. Help.
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For sound engineering it’s more useful to think of a capacitor as a gate that only lets electricity through when there’s a voltage change. Different sized capacitors have different frequencies that they start to work at. So you can use capacitors in your circuits to act as frequency filters. You can put one on the path you want your signal to go, and it will filter out low frequencies (it’s a high pass filter). Or you can put one on a side street that goes nowhere interesting (“ground”), and it will detour the high-frequency stuff that way, pulling it out of your signal. So when used that way, it’s a low pass filter.
Capacitors also take a little time to charge, and you can change the amount of time by adding resistors and changing the capacitor size, so you can use capacitors to make delay elements too. You can make circuits that charge and then discharge, and the resultant waveform looks like an ugly sine wave. The frequency of the waveform depends on the sizes of the capacitors and resistors you chose. So you can use capacitors to make an oscillator or a synthesizer.
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