To clarify, I understand magnets vibrating fabric, and how that produces noise. I do not know how one constantly vibrating thing can produce multiple tones at the same time as required for music. Like base and trebels together in songs, how can you hear both at the same time?
In:
Your ear also works basically by an eardrum, a single surface that vibrates.
Tones are simply a question of vibrating frequency. Bass is very slow vibration, high-end sounds are very rapid vibrations.
If you scratch a chalkboard, your nail doesn’t really carve the board, it jumps/taps super rapidly along it making sound at each contact. So it interacts at high frequency and produces treble.
If you hit a bass drum, it vibrates rather slowly, creating bass.
But you can, mathematically, add one wave to another, creating a mixed wave of both. If they’re different enough by themselves, your ear can distinguish between both. That’s a typical concern of electronic music producers, to make sure bassline doesn’t drown out the kick drums and vocals don’t get muddled with mid-frequency synths where you cannot clearly hear neither. Well-produced track avoids those problems.
If you add same shape of wave together, but other one’s inversed, you get silence. 1+(-1)=0. That’s what noise-cancelling headphones, putting it bluntly – try to do.
So ELI5 answer is that waves are just bits of math that can be added and subtracted and mixed. In the end, it’s just vibration with different bits at different frequency happening in rhythm.
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