Why People speaking with the same pitch, in the same octave, same everything sound different.

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If you didn’t get the question, what makes peoples’ voices different even if they try to make everything the same.

In: Biology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Timbre or, sound color. The same way instruments all have a different tone for the same note

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is a part of every sound (don’t know the English word for it, sorry) that will make you recognize what it is. A guitar, drums, voices… anything.
If you remove that part or make it lower, you can still hear and recognize that sound, but it’s weird…
I can’t give you a 100% answer, but I can only imagine there are hundred of little things that make a difference to our ear…

Anonymous 0 Comments

Their vocal cords are different, and produce a unique “formant” and “timbre” – essentially a different set of overtones that change the tone of the sound.

It’s the same reason a violin playing the same pitch, in the same octave, as a flute, won’t be mistaken for a flute. They have different timbres.

There’s a further difference when you consider someone talking with their head voice or their chest voice, which changes how breathy their voice sounds and therefore changes the overtone series too.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A sound is actually a pressure wave traveling through a medium (usually the air). Unless that wave has a perfectly sinusoidal pattern (a sine wave), it will contain some amount of variation in its shape. Those variations are interpreted by our brain as timbre, or tone color.

Topics for further research:

Harmonic Series, Fundamental Frequency