How does our brain recognize a sound (musical or otherwise) as pleasant?
In: Biology
A basic idea is harmonics. Sounds are made of waves. The amplitude of the wave determines how loud it is, while the frequency of the wave determines it’s pitch. The frequency of the wave also determines it’s wavelength, literally how long the wave actually is. When multiple sounds are played together, the combined waveform still has all of the shapes of the underlying inside it, just layered atop each other. If a wave is layered atop a wave twice as long as it, it’s called a harmonic and it sounds really good to our ears because the waveforms line up nicely. Generally speaking waves that have simple whole numbers ratios in wavelengths tend to sound good together because of this. If their waveforms are not multiples of each other, it tends to sound bad together, getting worse as they get closer to those nice whole number ratios.
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