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
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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