I just can’t wrap my head around it. Is it just crazy brain things, a difference in number of waves, or some other thing? How is it possible that a speaker can replicate all sounds?
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A specific frequency wave is just a tone. When we hear a voice, car, or alarm, it’s tons of waves all at different frequencies, adding together at the same time that turns it into a sound that we can distinguish.
In music, A above middle C is 440Hz. If you had any instrument playing that note, it would have a fundamental frequency of 440Hz, but it would still sound different than a pure 440Hz sine wave (tone). That’s because the instrument has so many different places the wave can bounce around clash with itself, creating a bunch of harmonic frequencies that when they add together, we can tell if it’s a piano, or a violin, or a trumpet making the noise.
[Here is a tone generator](https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/) you can play around with different frequencies, and you can see how a sine wave, square wave, triangle wave, and sawtooth wave all sound different despite being the same frequencies. It won’t let you add them together, but it’s a good basis for how sounds are different from each other, even if they are the same frequencies.
If you’ve ever heard a powerline arc, it’s the same sound as a 60Hz (or 50Hz depending on where you live) square wave.
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