How do speakers work?

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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?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I can totally see how this is confusing, it might help to think about a speaker as a reverse ear – they both have surfaces that move with the changing air pressure. Your ear has no problem hearing two different tones at once.

The reason this works is the idea of superposition – when you have two tones playing together they add up to make a complicated shape. These tones can be split up by clever maths (fourier transform) or by your clever brain.

I guess it’s a bit like a pixel on the screen you’re looking at right now. There are three ‘tones’ red, blue and green. When you have multiple of these ‘tones’ on in the same pixel they mix together to make another colour, but still contain all the information from the base colours, which can be separated from each other.

When you see a waveform in a program like Audacity you’re seeing the result of adding all these tones together. The speaker follows the waveform shown, but it is built from lots of different tones which can still be extracted.

If you do an image search for superposition you’ll get a better understanding of how all these different frequency components add together.

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