When I was a kid me and my sister used to play this game, where we screamed next to each other to hear this flanging overtone in our ears.
Since then I always wondered where it came from… And if it could be reproduced with synthesizers somehow?
In: Physics
It’s called “dissonance.” Imagine two sine waves (sound waves), but one has a slightly higher frequency (the peaks of the waves are closer). When the waves overlap, there will be a lot of places where they intersect/cross. That’s what you’re hearing – those areas where the waves overlap and get louder/softer.
This mostly happens with sounds that are close in frequency (like two keys on a piano right next to each other), but can happen at other intervals too. There’s also “magic” intervals, where the overlapping sound is actually very nice (chords). There’s a lot of math involved that I do not understand, but you can hear when a chord is wrong – you’ll hear the warbles.
You’re referring to a resonant interference pattern. Pretty much anything that makes a consistent tone can have this effect if the frequency (hz) is slightly offset from one point to another. Even the reflection of the sound off he right medium can induce a slight offset and create the effect.
Well I had to look up the term “flanger”.
I suspect that what you’re experiencing is wave pattern interference. Sound is a wave in the air, and these waves are literal lines of compression moving through the molecules of air outwards from the source.
You can picture sound like ripples on a lake surface after you toss a rock in. The height of those ripples would correspond with the volume of the sound, and how closely packed together they are would correspond with the frequency or pitch of the sound.
If you throw two big rocks in the lake, separated by a few feet, you’ll notice that some of the ripples join together and become larger ripples, while others appear to cancel each other out making gaps between the ripples. Overall the ripple pattern will have an odd new pattern shape where they overlap. This is wave pattern interference, and it happens to sound, too.
Typically you’ll get a bouncing rhythm when two non-rhythmic sounds overlap. That doesn’t exactly sound like what flanger means, but then “screaming” isn’t a steady sound either.
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