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.
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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.
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