When out and about in public, how do sounds not cancel each other out?

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I get constructive and deconstructive, but those are usually in the context of being the same frequency and just being out of phase. I’m talking like…you and your bud having a conversation in a restaurant, with music playing, convos around you, sound of wait staff, etc. If a waiter drops a plate, how does that sound transit through at that higher, unique frequency through all the other noise so that all can hear it?

Thank you for your time!

In: Physics

24 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The simplest explanation is that the air is behaving as a linear system with respect to the pressure waves from all sources and therefore obeying the Superposition Principle.

If you record a complex sound, load it into a sound editor like audacity, then zoom right in as far as you can go, you will see just a single line, with time horizontally and amplitude (pressure) vertically. Each point on that line is the sound pressure at that point in time, which is just the sum of the sound pressures from all the sound sources at that point in time.

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