I mean, guitarists can play the same notes as the human voice, but why they can never (or at least I’ve never seen) reproduce the actual letters to sing a word that is understandable?
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Tone is one of many aspects of a sound that makes it… well, sound, the way it does. Timbre, harmonics, color, and I’m sure there are others a sound engineer could name off. But if you’ve ever heard a sine wave generator (you can Google this and have a listen). This is the only “pure” tone. Just one frequency. Every single other sound you e ever heard is a combination of frequencies. The exact combination of frequencies is what makes it sound different while still maintaining the same “base” frequency or “tone.” People can sound like guitars, but guitars can’t sound like people. That’s because guitars, once made, have a fixed set of timbre/harmonics/color/ whatever because they are generally very rigid objects.
Humans, on the other hand, can change the shape of their mouths, position of their tongues, the pathways air takes through their throat, and can even change the rigidity of various parts of the process by flexing or relaxing certain muscles. We can make soooooo many different sounds. But whatever sound you make can be recorded. If it can be recorded, we can analyze what weird combination of frequencies are all stacked on top of each other to create that specific sound, and then we could theoretically play back of those frequencies, one in each speaker, and it would sound like a human… or guitar… or whatever you recorded. (We tend to take a shortcut and add up all the frequencies at once to play them out of one speaker… or just just the raw audio before we’ve picked apart what frequencies make it up)
So essentially, a guitar only has one kind of jumbled up combination of frequencies that it plays for any given tone. And it’s not exactly what a human does for that same tone. (Actually, you can probably play the same tone on 2 different strings of a guitar, and there may be just enough subtle difference to even pick up on that) also, theoretically, if you had, like, 100 guitars and each guitarist had 6 different frequencies they can play, and they all coordinated to take some of the frequencies that make up your voice and played them all at the same time, the resulting combination could sound like a voice as well. I think theoretically, you’d need infinitely many guitars to sound exactly like a human, but finite approximations are more than adequate for most things. Check out Mark Rober’s auto playing piano video for an example where he made a piano talk… sort of… like I said, it’s only a finite approximation.
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