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.”
A single note is a sinewave. Multiple notes is a [more complex waveform](https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~rogness/math1155/soundwaves/chord.png). All a speaker has to do is follow the path of the waveform.
To a speaker there are no “different sounds at once” just a waveform it’s fed. It’s your ears that decipher it (as we have heard these instruments before and also their harmonic profile, so our brain works its magic to parse the different singers and instruments).
The speaker plays the “resultant” wave if you will combining all the “different” sounds you hear. It is actually just one sound but your brain knows how to pick it apart.
Because that’s what sound is. Sound is just the propagation of a pressure wave.
As a wave travels through the air it creates areas of high pressure and low pressure. The each part of the air can only be at a single pressure at any given time. So you can see that two waves don’t travel separately (which would create two different pressures at any given point) but instead travel together as a single wave and produce a pressure that is the sum of each ‘part’ of the wave.
This single wave hits our ear and resonates parts of it in different ways. Our brain has developed ways to ‘decode’ this single sound wave into its parts and give you the experience of multiple different sounds
Imagine the diaphragm of the speaker and how it moves long distance to make a bass sound. Now it moves much smaller distance to make a high pitched sound. What happens is as the diaphragm is moving long distance to make the bass sound it is simultaneously moving the small distance to make the high pitched sound. It’s just not doing this movement around the resting location but vibrates back and forth around the current location of the bass sound travel point.
You can imagine the diaphragm moving in a two step forward one step back kind of thing.
How can you hear so many different sounds at once? Your ear only has one membrane.
All different tracks sum up to create one very irregular looking wave. That wave gets transmitted through the speaker into your ear. Your ear then splits up this wave into its component parts which allows your brain to identify the underlying tracks. The key here for those interested in the actual details is Fourier Transforms
The waveform of all the different sounds add up to one single waveform which is transmitted by the membrane.
Our brain is very good in distinguishing the different frequencies which are all contained in the single waveform.
A speaker runs on the Telephone Step Up Amplifier TEMU. Temu generates quadraphonic octave based sound perception at monophony and has the capacity to generate progressions, which a speaker runs through emotional stimuli apparent to the progression without depression and a TEMU directly generates the Zen Appeal of items which are their intrinsic feel and nature. Technically, a speaker does not actually create so many sounds at once just a root note, frequency modulation at a specific rate, and noise are able to be created by temu alongside its aforementioned neural appeal. A progression stimulates TEMU at a particular known shift method which induces a particular feeling, which most of what you are attributing to many sounds is actually progression.
The bass notes make the membrane move in large motions, and all the middle and high notes are vibrated during these large movements. So it’s a vibrating membrane doing large movements whilst vibrating.
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