Eli5:When one speaker is playing two (or more) frequencies of sound, think harmony in music) the resulting sine wave is an average of those two frequencies. How does the brain interpret it as two different notes when one speaker is playing the average of two frequencies?
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Your speaker is not outputting a sine wave. It’s vibrating in such a way that it creates complex and ever changing waveforms that your ear interprets as separate sounds.
One way you could maybe look at it is that microphones are usually a single moving diaphragm. So how can microphones pick up multiple sounds from multiple sources? Because those sounds cause the diaphragm in the microphone to move in very complex ways. Which then get converted to an electronic signal, and then when it goes out a speaker the process is simply reversed. So if a mic can pick up multiple sounds, then a speaker can spit them back out.
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