I have never really fully understood how a speaker vibrating air molecules which then in turn vibrate the membrane in your ear works. How can a speaker make multiple sounds at the exact same time if its based on movement of a physical object?
In: Physics
The way sound works is by compressing the air in waves, leaving waves of compressed and decompressed air. These compressions can interfere with each other and carry multiple vibrations at once through the air, much like your tv cable sends red, green, blue, and brightness signals all at once, but since the electrons are vibrating differently, the tv can pick them out.
With sound, these interferences can be made by vibrating a speaker in the same pattern. Rather than being purely “on” or “off,” a speaker’s driver can vibrate in many different ways and stop anywhere in it’s translation depending on how electricity hits the driver. This can make funky shaped waves that carry all of the different sounds inside of them, more or less. Otherwise, you get closer to a pure sine wave which has equal peaks and troughs and looks rather pleasant. The same kind of sound you get from a simple PC speaker made for post beeps and codes.
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