Title. Don’t they have the same frequency? Why would they sound different?
In: Physics
The actual *note* as we know it may be the same, but the underlying harmonics are not.
Let’s take an overdrive-riding djent guitarist managing to hit the same note as their bassist. Let’s toss some arbitrary Hz number out there like 200hz frequency for the note. The actual sound may be passing through the zero point 400 times a second, but the actual shape of the wave would not be purely sinusoidal. For example the guitar since it is overdriven is probably clipping, so instead of nice smooth peaks and valleys the wave reaches a high point and sharply levels out before dropping down. Meanwhile the bass guitar soundwave might look a lot more like a natural sine wave.
So in effect a note is just how many times per second the soundwave “passes through zero” (how fast it is vibrating), but the actual shape of that soundwave gives it the distinct actual sound. You can play around with this for yourself with a free app from the app store on your phone that gives you instruments like sawtooth waves and square waves — the actual shape of the wave is different.
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