ELi5: Why do microphones make a high pitched sound when they’re close together? What causes the sound?
In: Technology
It’s not when you bring two microphones together, but when a microphone gets too close to a speaker that’s playing directly from that same microphone. And you also need an initial sound to set it off – in complete silence it would never start.
What happens is that the microphone picks up a sound, which then gets played through the speaker and so the microphone picks that up and it gets played back through the speaker etc.etc.etc. this causes the sound to keep getting louder and louder.
The squeal is caused by the particular amplification profiles of the mic and speaker, and the particular position and orientation they are in relative to each other. When all of those things come together to mean that higher pitched elements of the sound get picked up and amplified better than others then it keeps making it higher and higher pitched with each loop as well as louder.
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