The theory behind sound is very simple – waves are just added up, so the amplitude of two exactly identical waves is doubled, if one of them is shifted by pi radians they cancel and the amplitude becomes 0, if it’s shifted by less or more then a pattern is created that causes periodic pulses of sound. However, in everyday experience, this is practically nonexistent. If the “valleys” of sound waves subtract from the “peaks” of other sound waves, and if waves spend half of their time in a valley, I’d expect that exactly half of the time sounds would cancel each other, but I’ve literally never experienced anything other than more sounds = higher volume, not even in an orchestra with many people playing the same note. What gives?
In: Physics
If you have a bunch of sound sources, some of which are constructively interfering and some which are destructively interfering, you aren’t going to hear the destructively interfering ones. You do hear constructive interference.
Sound waves vibrate very quickly. The chances that randomly all the sounds interfering are going to sum to zero for a long period of time without deliberate effort is practically nil.
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