How speakers can make so many different sounds at once when they only have one membrane
In: Physics
Well, our ears only have one membrane. Sound is vibration of the air, but our eardrums can only resonate with that vibrating air in one specific way in any given moment. So, if it’s the case that we can hear multiple things at once, it must be the case that the air can vibrate not just in one specific way at any given moment, but somehow in multiple ways at once.
And this basically the case. You might know that we can represent any specific tone as a waveform. The wave represents the frequency of the vibration. But the thing about waveforms is that [you can add them together](https://musicandcomputersbook.com/images/chapter3/sumofsines.jpg) to get more complex ones. Provided there’s no destructive interference between the original waveforms, it should be possible to extrapolate what the individual waveforms that make up that complex wave form were – and this is what your brain does when it hears multiple instruments. The ears hear a single complex waveform of all the vibrations reaching your ears at once, and the brain does the work of saying “Okay that bit is the violins, that bit is the brass section.”
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