A vinyl record is a copy of a musical recording. How can a series of grooves or channels cut into a peice of vinly medium reproduce different instruments and sounds precisely to our ears? Apologies if this is this more of a medical question or sound engineering question. I understand how the music is cut and transferred to a vinyl medium but how do we know it’s a piano vs a distorted guitar? How can these primative grooves hold such information or does every soundwave hold that specific information? A digital stream or even a cassette tape makes more sense than how a vinly disc plays back music of different genres.
In: 0
Every sound is just a series of pressure waves in air. If you pluck a guitar string or tap the key of a piano it will just make a sequence of vibrations in the air, and that is what the grooves in the record are storing. Our ability to distinguish the kind of instrument comes down to the complexity and differences in those sound waves.
Remember that air can only be one pressure at any given point and time. Each of your ears only contains one eardrum which can only be in one place at a time. One groove then, tracked by one needle, can in principle record any sound you are capable of hearing.
As you probably know from the many times this gets asked here, [sounds combine into one continuous disturbance of the air](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxdFP31QYAg). Your question is what happens when that goes into our ears—how do we then pull it back apart and recognize the separate sound sources, like different instruments?
It’s a difficult question to answer. In the inner ear, the vibrations of the eardrum are transmitted to a series of hairs, each of which is sensitive to a different, overlapping frequency (pitch) range. The hairs stimulate nerves to send separate electrical signals to the brain.
Through evolution and conditioning, our brains have gotten to be pretty good at recognizing certain combinations of these signals as having distinct sources, e.g. being attributable to a particular instrument, creature, or phenomenon.
That explanation sounds a bit hand-wavy, though. The truth is, we don’t really know how the brain does much of anything. It’s an incredibly complex and mysterious organ, and we’ve only been studying it for a very short time, in the grand scheme of things.
Outside of the technical aspect of vinyl playback, it’s a psychology thing more than anything else. We know what a piano or a guitar sounds like, so we’re able to pick out those sounds from the playback. If a person had never heard a piano before, for example, they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint that sound to the same degree as we do. It’s similar to taste in the sense that you need to have knowledge of what different ingredients taste like to be able to isolate a specific flavour within a dish.
When a vinyl record is played, the grooves on the disc contain precise information about the different instruments and sounds
As the needle follows the grooves, it vibrates and produces specific frequencies that our ears can distinguish, allowing us to identify different instruments and genres of music
It’s fascinating how these primitive grooves can hold such detailed information!
When you hear a note, a bone in your ear wiggles. That bone is attached to a nerve and it sends the same wiggly signal into the brain. The two different notes can be differentiated because they are different frequencies.
> how do we know it’s a piano vs a distorted guitar?
More than just the frequency, there’s a LOT of information that comes in with sound. It’s really a mix of all the various frequencies with all the behaviours and traits like… uh… echo, fade, cut-off, distortion… Man, I dunno, there’s a lot there. It’s like describing all the colors and hues, you can go on and on and on.
>How can these primative grooves hold such information or does every soundwave hold that specific information?
Because sound is nothing more than vibration. A set of wiggles. And that can be recorded with only 1 dimension, like a needle going back and forth. …You know those grooves were traditionally recorded directly from the source, right? If you take some wax and a needle and a big ol cone, and scream into it, the wax RECORDS your scream. And allllll the nuance and detail of that vibration gets etched in.
Latest Answers