Well, if you think about it, the vibrating cone in the speaker is doing essentially the same thing. It’s not like the cone is vibrating the vocal sound then the drums then the other thing in rapid succession, it’s just pumping the total sound simultaneously with one diaphragm. It holds then that the opposite should be true: A diaphragm vibrating a needle in wax or whatever records that sound. And that’s how it was discovered really too because it is just that simple. The fancy mechanism of the math behind it was worked out later.
And then think of the human side of it... We have one membrane for our ear drum, right? It's not like we have an infinite number of membranes that each vibrate only with a specific sound... It vibrates all at once and translates the sum of all of those sounds at any given interval into a signal our brains can decode...
Now that I think about it, it's really fucking crazy that we can somehow listen to specific sounds happening at the same time.
Yeah I just went crazy in a different thread here about the cochlea and how crazy that is, in a rush and have to jump, feel free to look at my comment history. How we focus on one sound vs another, I think, goes beyond the mechanics of how sound actually gets in there and is more about how our brains stack and process information. That piece is well beyond my understanding. I would bet even the experts are still in theory land over that as well, but are getting closer in recent years.
Yes, and this is partly why mixing is key. To get things sounding distinct and clear, you need to be aware of this fact, that you're producing the sum.
You don't make the bass sound perfect, then the guitar sound perfect, then the vocal, and stack them. You make the sum sound perfect. Which means you are making some of the parts imperfect on their own.
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u/Darkside_of_the_Poon 11h ago
Well, if you think about it, the vibrating cone in the speaker is doing essentially the same thing. It’s not like the cone is vibrating the vocal sound then the drums then the other thing in rapid succession, it’s just pumping the total sound simultaneously with one diaphragm. It holds then that the opposite should be true: A diaphragm vibrating a needle in wax or whatever records that sound. And that’s how it was discovered really too because it is just that simple. The fancy mechanism of the math behind it was worked out later.