Like for example when I’m listening to an orchestra I can hear a clarinet and a violin quite distinctly from one another, but they’re both sounds vibrating through the same air. Logically, shouldn’t one air only be able to carry one frequency (Vibrate in only one way)? How does the air contain so many frequencies simultaneously?
In: 80
As far as my brain simplifies this, it goes like this:
Yes it is just one air vibrating. But if you can apply a filter on it, you can divide this vibration into simpler vibrations.
Kinda like how a prism can filter out the sunlight into various colors, the cochlea inside your ear can filter out the various simple vibrations from the complex vibrations hitting your ear.
There are tiny hairs inside the cochlea, each vibrates at a different frequency. So when the complex vibrations from the air hit your ear, only very specific hairs will vibrate giving you the sensation that you can hear the drums and violins.
Another way to look at it is when you throw a rock in a puddle, it creates ripples. If you throw more rocks, by your logic water should only carry ripples from one of them, but instead these ripples merge/mix. If you stand far enough from the point where you threw the rocks, you will indeed see just one ripple, but if you apply a filter on these ripples you will be able to see that this apparently one ripple is complex and causes by throwing more than just one rock. Kinda like how your brain knows that despite only listening to just one complex vibration in the air, you can actually hear many different frequencies at the same time
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