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.
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