(in the sense that you will know if you heard a piano or a guitar) what stayed the same and what changed with the sound wave? Second related question, if you get two people to say the word “hello” they will sound completely different but you will be able to hear that they both said hello. So in that case what changed with the sound wave and what stayed the same?
Sorry if it’s the wrong flair I put it as physics because sound waves so yeah
In: Physics
The thing that changed is the [timbre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbre).
A musical note can be defined in terms of its frequency – [how fast the thing is vibrating](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PETuX_pXLNU). If you think of a “pure” note as being one single frequency (440Hz, so 440 vibrations per second, in [this example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buimPG01gcs)), real life instruments never play just that. Instead, you get a mixture of that base frequency and all the multiples of that frequency: 880Hz, 1320Hz, 1760Hz, 2200Hz, and so on and so forth. These things are called [overtones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBobSVZJfo8).
The thing that makes different instruments sound different is that they emphasise some overtones and not others.
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