It's actually quite straight forward. Inside the record player there's a small group of highly trained goblins. They watch the needle move side to side and they perfectly recreate the music using their tiny instruments.
I got the knockoff version that had an understaffed team of mostly complacent fairies using thrift shop keyboards. I tried playing Hocus Pocus by Focus and they burned down my house and flew off with my neighbor's cat.
It's not that hard to grasp I don't think. If you understand graphs of soundwaves, it's literally just the wave scratched into the plastic. The movement of the needle dictates the movement of the speaker membrane which results in the same movement in your eardrum. Which is what you percieve as sound.
What I don't get, personally, is how this one scratched-in groove wave can contain a bassline, a melody and a singing voice and they all can be differentiated coming out of the speaker.
How speakers work in general is just black magic to me, actually.
Basically any wave can be created by adding together individual frequencies, and with some fancy math it's possible to go the other way with a Fourier transform and get how loud every frequency is (like is displayed in a spectrogram).
I think the real black magic is in how our ears and brains can decode the mess of information coming in and identify meaningful patterns.
A nice related bookmark I have saved. There's also interactive pert with a slider where you can draw a wave and then add more and more sinusoids to get closer and closer. And of course the square wave, with infinite sinusoids (theoretically). https://www.jezzamon.com/fourier/
Speakers do the simplest thing possible and literally just vibrate. A recording being played literally just recreates a recorded vibration. It's a tiny choreography that your ears are incredibly sensitive for.
All the fancy stuff happens in our brains, after our ears has split up the sound around us into different ranges of frequencies (you can think of the hairs in the inner ears as tuning forks). We learn to recognize which frequencies goes together, and then we learn how the frequencies from multiple sources can overlap, and we learn what it all means
The real crazy part is how something as simple as sound can carry so much information and how reliably our brains can tell it all apart and make sense of it
An easier way to understand it, without knowing the math, is to know how it's made. You play audio into a very similar device and it's needle scratches the grooves. When you then have a needle pick up the grooves it's moving the exact same way the needle was forced to move by the original.
It's similar to how a speaker and a microphone are basically the same device. If you take a speaker and plug it into a microphone input, it still works (though they're tuned differently so it's not as good). A microphone has a crystal vibrate, which creates an electric signal. If you play that electric signal into a crystal it vibrates and creates the same sound.
There's no math or anything being done for this to work. It's purely mechanical. It's just a copy of what the needle did when sound was played into it, so another needle running through it recreates the same sound. You can use math to represent it, but none is being done by the device (other than just the laws of physics).
All the sounds get mixed together as they approach you (as they compress the same air), by the time it gets to your ear it can be represented by one complex wave.
Yeah, waves add. Which, well they add from the center which looks weird and bumpy. What’s more amazing is how good our ears are at picking out differences (it’s like 100x more sensitive to differences than other senses) so it can tell what all those individual waves would be so we can still hear the guitar vs drums vs bass vs vocals when it’s all one wave combined.
If you can build up intuition around Fourier decomposition I think it gets much easier to understand.
Multiple things going on at the same frequency are indistinguishable (up to a phase). Lots of stuff going on at different frequency can be separated. Light also has frequency (color) and volume (intensity)---it may be more intuitive to conceptualize in this way.
Ironically, I work a lot with Fourier Transform. Still feels like magic. I even taught it! I’m trying to develop more intuition about it (vs hard knowledge)
But all sounds are vibration. If you capture the vibration, you capture all of the sound. The "different sounds" are all a single pattern of vibration; it's the brain and inner ear that decodes the vibration into separate sounds. And hence it can also be difficult to do, depending on what the sounds are.
It’s not that hard to grasp if you read up a bit. You are probably born early 1900’s and have never heard of stereophonic recordings. But fear not!! What you are seeing is left + right channel (mono). The left - right channel is encoded vertically. So your left channel is mono + vertical divided by 2, and the right is (mono - vertical) divided by 2.
How does it seem like multiple sounds come through at the same time though? Say drums and vocals and a guitar, all at once. How does one groove equate to all of that?
Highly basic answer, let's say the strength of the vocals wave over time is:
5, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4
And drums is:
4, 0, 2, 0, 4, 0, 2, 3
Then you add them together for each time slice and get:
9, 4, 5, 2, 7, 4, 7, 7
And you put that on a record, or out to a speaker, and our ears are able to break that up into the two parts when it hears it. This is the same as when two things are in the room making sound, there may be two sources, but my ear only has one hole, and that hole has one eardrum behind it. The different sounds just add their powers together and hit my ear as one mixed wave.
Okay, I see this is very simplified, but an instrument consists of more than a strength? Given how many different instruments and voices exist - how many different individual waveforms exist? A flute should have another waveform than a saxophone and my voice is different to that one of your mother.
Yeah! The "timbre" (which despite how it looks is said "tamber") of an instrument is its audio "profile". It's what makes a piano different than a flute, or on a more subtle level makes one piano slightly different from another.
But here's the nuts part: what makes up the timbre of an instrument is a bunch of different resonating bits all resonating together. Essentially the reason a flute sounds like a flute is because it comes "pre-loaded" with a boatload of simple waveforms already added together. When you play a note on one, you get the main pitch you're playing, but the instrument's body and your breath all also produce a whack-ton of side tones all playing at the same time. And like a fingerprint, our ear/brain hears all these bits start and stop together and says "that's a flute".
So it's the same process, really: simple bits adding together. But "flute sound" isn't the atom. It's made up of a bunch of simple waves already added together, which then gets added to the other sounds that sound like pianos or guitars, which produces the final mix.
I don't know if you'll get anything out of it, but you could look up videos of a "modular synth" setting up a trumpet sound or something. These devices have simple electronic tone generators, but by layering them and plugging them into each other, and using effects and the like, they can start to mimic the timbre of a trumpet or whatever. By essentially adding together the "key bits" of the harmonics (these other waves) they can start to approach the feeling of a trumpet sound, but just with simple, raw, parts.
Yeah! It's dope. With this new understanding I'll circle back around. In an indirect sense the groove of a record represents how far our eardrum should be from its "silent resting position" over time. That's it. The brain is what takes that complicated signal that varies over time and makes something it recognizes out of it.
And then the information encoded on a CD, or magnetic tape, or in a compressed audio file is just the same thing: distance of eardrum from neutral over time.
Oh, and stereo and surround sound and all that is just different audio tracks that play out of different speakers at a synchronized time. Again, it's our brain that notices it hears a flute in the left ear very slightly before it hears it in the right ear and thus feels like that means there's a flute to our left. But there's nothing "flute left" about either individual signal, they're just different audio that we detected a slight difference in from ear to ear.
Definitely, but you only ever perceive all that because of the one-dimenaional way your eardrums vibrate, and they vibrate because the air next to them vibrates. If we make the air next to your eardrums vibrate in the same pattern they did when the band were performing, you will hear and perceive the same sound as the band made.
You should be aware that an amplified band is only ever making sound at you through a bunch of speakers whose only function is to vibrate air in a one dimensional pattern.
Separating that all out into different instruments and people and timbres etc is the clever bit, and your brain does that, not the speaker, and you largely learned it as a child.
This is fascinating. I never realized that sound is processed like this. Not that different from sight then, which is processing a bunch of electromagnetic frequencies.
In theory an infinite amount of different waveforms. But practically speaking, no one would be able to distinguish them by ear, and even oscilloscopes have limited resolution.
Music is super complex and can't even be described by a single or a few waveforms, unless it's very simple.
Another simplified way to explain all the sounds of music fitting on one "waveform" is to imagine the high frequency stuff happening in between the low frequency stuff. And usually the different instruments and voices don't happen all at once, they happen slightly one after another, or in sync but intentionally so they affect each other the "right" way. Whatever the "right" way is...
That's the neat part, the brain does that using some black magic. You just have to add all the sounds individual waves together and the brain deciphers it.
It's true that the ears receive stereo input, but brain postprocesses it to make surround sound. It uses the time difference from sound hitting your right and left ear to do some black magic and figure out at which angle the sound is coming from.
Another interesting part on this is that the brain is pretty bad at detecting whether a sound is coming from the front or back of the head so it uses visual cues and combines it with the processed sound to make it seem like it's coming from either the front or the back.
You can add the waveforms together mathematically. Like if you go into a graphing calculator and plot a sine at 220 hz that's an A note. Then add two more at 261(ish) and 329, baby you got yourself an A minor cookin'. That's also what the groove would look like.
Well if you put multiple waveforms above eachother the form on single waveform.(They all occupie the same space,in this case air, so they can't be "separate"). This waveform is then recorded and remastered and whatnot. But basically the waves you can see on the vinyl are the "schape" they will have in the air.
Take it back. How does the vibrating air equate to all that? It's not like there's a drums bit of air and a vocals bit of air - the vibration is all smushed together. Your brain separates it back out again. That's why it can take training to separately hear some bits of music, or why you can't usually pick out individual voices in a choir.
That part still kinda mystifies me. I understand that it's a single waveform and you can just add together all the different waveforms of each instrument but it still blows my mind. Kinda like I sort of understand magnets but it still seems like magic.
With vinyl records it's pretty cool how it can do right and left channels. For the right channel the needle vibrates diagonally in one direction in the groove and the left channel vibrates diagonally in the other direction.
Yeah the basic concept makes sense to me, but I'm still fascinated by the level of detail and instrumentation they can fit into those tiny grooves. It's not like midi, like a piano roll, it is playing back shit that was recorded. It's cool af.
The video explains how a single needle can play stereo sound, but in doing so explains how the basic idea works before going into the incredible design to do two channels.
I tried to duplicate what you have (which works in your example) but it broke it badly, so I left it. One day all the Fediverse will be universal in how it works.
Some software clients parsing the Fediverse protocol treat some special markdowns differently. It's gotten better as new versions are updated to recognize more, but it's still a thing.
Tat's the neat part about it. Scientists dont understand it either.
How computers work is also some form of witchcraft. Even tho I understand the principles behind it, it still is literally magic that we get computers to execute stuff.
What's crazy to me is that this technology was used for only a few dozen years before it was replaced and for thousands of years beforehand there was nothing like it
Records are very easy to understand. Even without a microscope, you can see periodic patterns on test vinyls with beeps. And sound being periodic motion is also obvious from string and percussive instruments.
You can even see tracks starting and ending on pressed CDs under the right lighting with your own eyes. I wonder, is the encoding of silence (approx. 2 seconds) really that different or does the density of grooves or pit/land pattern intentionally differ to help the player seek there faster? I know that uncompressed audio naturally results in a repeated pattern when silence is encoded but given the 8-to-14 modulation and other error correctiion techniques, I find it hard to believe it would result in significantly different density unless they specifically added a special mode just for encoding silence that makes the track brighter-colored for easier coarse seeking.
Theres a graphic somewhere I'll try to find that shows a bird call as a sound wave then a picture of record topography of the same call that makes it fairly obvious.
Gramophones are also fairly illustrative given that the needle directly acts on a diaphragm that is directly connected to a bell shaped horn.
Long runs of no changes is generally undesirable because it makes it harder to know where the reader is. So you’d want some type of coding to make sure you see changes occasionally regardless of where you are. For CDs, it seems like each byte is converted into 14 bits, where the longest run of zeroes is 10.
I know, among other things there is a time code inserted very frequently between audio data, without which seeking would not be possible at all. However, the audio uses over 90 % of the data so it's largely responsible for the overall appearance of the track.
Consider this: every record I play has a faint recording of the room, every time it has been played, since no turntable or cartridge is perfectly isolated, and, being diamond rubbing against vinyl, will leave some trace of the room sound behind.
Sound is air vibrations at different strengths (volume) and frequencies (pitch). Taller waves are loud. Thinner waves are higher pitched. The math looks like this:
Volume * sin( Pitch * time)
Generally, low pitch sounds are louder and easier to see in a sound wave. A kick is really easy to spot. The rest of the weird janky movement of the sound wave is like a bunch of these equations added up to create the sound... generally.
The trick to understanding sound is that it's a difference over time. The change in pressure is registered by your brain. A record player is literally just the physical transcription of this math and the speaker is just oscillating back and forth to reproduce the sound.
Okay maybe it's not super simple, but I hope this helps.
If you were able to go “puh puh puh” in someone’s ear 440 times per second, they’d hear a middle A note if they didn’t punch you first.
Imagine a delicate needle in front of your mouth. If you “puh” at it, it wiggles. If you play an A on a violin, the violin string wiggles 440 times per second. That vibrates the air around the string at the same speed. That air vibrates your ear drum 440 times per second, so you hear it. But it also vibrates the needle. Now let that needle carve a pattern in a spinning disc. That pattern of pressure is now recorded. If you harden that disc and balance a needle over it and spin it again at the same speed, the needle will vibrate 440 times per second. You can use that to make a big floppy piece of paper vibrate 440 times per second. That vibrates the air, which vibrates your ear drum just like the original violin string would’ve.
I'm a microbiologist. That's pretty normal. Things that look smooth and even when viewed normally frequently look different when significantly magnified. Your eyes can't resolve the fine details so your brain fills in the gaps.
152 Comments
Denjin@feddit.uk · 245 pts · 256d
It's actually quite straight forward. Inside the record player there's a small group of highly trained goblins. They watch the needle move side to side and they perfectly recreate the music using their tiny instruments.
Simple.
I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world · 49 pts · 255d
Ah, very similar to the camera (iconograph) filled with fast painting imps.
https://wiki.lspace.org/Iconograph
Denjin@feddit.uk · 12 pts · 255d
That may or may not have been my inspiration
then_three_more@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 255d
GNU Sir Terry
Dasus@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 253d
A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.
Death can't have him.
http://gnuterrypratchett.com/
fartographer@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 255d
I got the knockoff version that had an understaffed team of mostly complacent fairies using thrift shop keyboards. I tried playing Hocus Pocus by Focus and they burned down my house and flew off with my neighbor's cat.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 255d
It's because you played the boring album version, instead of the one and only 1973 live version.
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world · 7 pts · 256d
I heard their team-building theme song was Madonna's Into the Groove.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 255d
It's so simple
Zwiebel@feddit.org · 127 pts · 256d
It's not that hard to grasp I don't think. If you understand graphs of soundwaves, it's literally just the wave scratched into the plastic. The movement of the needle dictates the movement of the speaker membrane which results in the same movement in your eardrum. Which is what you percieve as sound.
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works · 69 pts · 255d
What I don't get, personally, is how this one scratched-in groove wave can contain a bassline, a melody and a singing voice and they all can be differentiated coming out of the speaker.
How speakers work in general is just black magic to me, actually.
xthexder@l.sw0.com · 110 pts · 255d
So there's this thing called a Fourier series...
Basically any wave can be created by adding together individual frequencies, and with some fancy math it's possible to go the other way with a Fourier transform and get how loud every frequency is (like is displayed in a spectrogram).
I think the real black magic is in how our ears and brains can decode the mess of information coming in and identify meaningful patterns.
Elgenzay@lemmy.ml · 74 pts · 255d
user224@lemmy.sdf.org · 29 pts · 255d
A nice related bookmark I have saved. There's also interactive pert with a slider where you can draw a wave and then add more and more sinusoids to get closer and closer. And of course the square wave, with infinite sinusoids (theoretically).
https://www.jezzamon.com/fourier/
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 255d
This reminds me, Bartosz Ciechanowski has an explainer about the whole sound thing.
Natanael@infosec.pub · 44 pts · 255d
That's because it doesn't, your brain does
Speakers do the simplest thing possible and literally just vibrate. A recording being played literally just recreates a recorded vibration. It's a tiny choreography that your ears are incredibly sensitive for.
All the fancy stuff happens in our brains, after our ears has split up the sound around us into different ranges of frequencies (you can think of the hairs in the inner ears as tuning forks). We learn to recognize which frequencies goes together, and then we learn how the frequencies from multiple sources can overlap, and we learn what it all means
The real crazy part is how something as simple as sound can carry so much information and how reliably our brains can tell it all apart and make sense of it
Zwiebel@feddit.org · 0 pts · 255d
This.
nocturne@slrpnk.net · 33 pts · 255d
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 255d
Nobody knows what magnets are. The best science can tell us is that you shouldn't drop them into a glass of water.
brb@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 255d
Why?
nocturne@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 255d
The US president told the navy that putting magnets in water could disable them, he also told Fox News twice that no one knows how magnets work.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-nobody-knows-what-magnet-is-quote/
Malfeasant@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
Well, the big ones anyway. The little ones use crystals.
Cethin@lemmy.zip · 13 pts · 255d
An easier way to understand it, without knowing the math, is to know how it's made. You play audio into a very similar device and it's needle scratches the grooves. When you then have a needle pick up the grooves it's moving the exact same way the needle was forced to move by the original.
It's similar to how a speaker and a microphone are basically the same device. If you take a speaker and plug it into a microphone input, it still works (though they're tuned differently so it's not as good). A microphone has a crystal vibrate, which creates an electric signal. If you play that electric signal into a crystal it vibrates and creates the same sound.
There's no math or anything being done for this to work. It's purely mechanical. It's just a copy of what the needle did when sound was played into it, so another needle running through it recreates the same sound. You can use math to represent it, but none is being done by the device (other than just the laws of physics).
captainlezbian@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 255d
Here's a video on the topic.
TheRealKuni@piefed.social · 3 pts · 255d
I was going to say, “I’m sure technology connections has done a video on this.”
Bubs@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 255d
This is from a video about headphones. His layman's explanation at the timestamp is probably the best I've heard it told:
https://youtu.be/4-rgrSFrwrs?t=647
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 255d
Exactly. It makes sense to me conceptually, but it still blows my mind
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de · 31 pts · 256d
Even simpler to visualize: Its the movement of the membrane of the speaker/microphone turned into a physical line.
Eq0@literature.cafe · 16 pts · 256d
That explains just a tiny part. There are so many different sounds at the same volume and frequency
gnu@lemmy.zip · 20 pts · 256d
All the sounds get mixed together as they approach you (as they compress the same air), by the time it gets to your ear it can be represented by one complex wave.
mp3@lemmy.ca · 15 pts · 255d
Like when you flatten all the layers in a graphics project.
davidagain@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 255d
This is a really interesting analogy. I perceive more than I see.
mp3@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 255d
FishFace@piefed.social · 2 pts · 255d
No, because flattening the layers is a lossy operation but this is reversible.
mp3@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 255d
Hmm good point!
TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip · 10 pts · 256d
Yeah, waves add. Which, well they add from the center which looks weird and bumpy. What’s more amazing is how good our ears are at picking out differences (it’s like 100x more sensitive to differences than other senses) so it can tell what all those individual waves would be so we can still hear the guitar vs drums vs bass vs vocals when it’s all one wave combined.
Eq0@literature.cafe · 3 pts · 256d
Magic!
qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website · 8 pts · 255d
If you can build up intuition around Fourier decomposition I think it gets much easier to understand.
Multiple things going on at the same frequency are indistinguishable (up to a phase). Lots of stuff going on at different frequency can be separated. Light also has frequency (color) and volume (intensity)---it may be more intuitive to conceptualize in this way.
Eq0@literature.cafe · 5 pts · 255d
Ironically, I work a lot with Fourier Transform. Still feels like magic. I even taught it! I’m trying to develop more intuition about it (vs hard knowledge)
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 255d
I forget most of them, but I remember there being several concepts in calculus that straight up felt like magic once I finally understood them.
FishFace@piefed.social · 3 pts · 255d
But all sounds are vibration. If you capture the vibration, you capture all of the sound. The "different sounds" are all a single pattern of vibration; it's the brain and inner ear that decodes the vibration into separate sounds. And hence it can also be difficult to do, depending on what the sounds are.
Oisteink@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 256d
It’s not that hard to grasp if you read up a bit. You are probably born early 1900’s and have never heard of stereophonic recordings. But fear not!! What you are seeing is left + right channel (mono). The left - right channel is encoded vertically. So your left channel is mono + vertical divided by 2, and the right is (mono - vertical) divided by 2.
nialv7@lemmy.world · 92 pts · 255d
Well sound is just wiggly air. You put the air wiggle onto the disk so later you can use the disk wiggle to make air wiggle.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 19 pts · 255d
He said never. That's an order.
Psythik@lemmy.world · 64 pts · 255d
Simple. Sounds are vibrations. The grooves make the needle vibrate. Those vibrations are amplified.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works · 19 pts · 255d
How does it seem like multiple sounds come through at the same time though? Say drums and vocals and a guitar, all at once. How does one groove equate to all of that?
psycotica0@lemmy.ca · 39 pts · 255d
Highly basic answer, let's say the strength of the vocals wave over time is:
5, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4
And drums is:
4, 0, 2, 0, 4, 0, 2, 3
Then you add them together for each time slice and get:
9, 4, 5, 2, 7, 4, 7, 7
And you put that on a record, or out to a speaker, and our ears are able to break that up into the two parts when it hears it. This is the same as when two things are in the room making sound, there may be two sources, but my ear only has one hole, and that hole has one eardrum behind it. The different sounds just add their powers together and hit my ear as one mixed wave.
Alternative answer: magic
gigachad@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 255d
Okay, I see this is very simplified, but an instrument consists of more than a strength? Given how many different instruments and voices exist - how many different individual waveforms exist? A flute should have another waveform than a saxophone and my voice is different to that one of your mother.
psycotica0@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 254d
Yeah! The "timbre" (which despite how it looks is said "tamber") of an instrument is its audio "profile". It's what makes a piano different than a flute, or on a more subtle level makes one piano slightly different from another.
But here's the nuts part: what makes up the timbre of an instrument is a bunch of different resonating bits all resonating together. Essentially the reason a flute sounds like a flute is because it comes "pre-loaded" with a boatload of simple waveforms already added together. When you play a note on one, you get the main pitch you're playing, but the instrument's body and your breath all also produce a whack-ton of side tones all playing at the same time. And like a fingerprint, our ear/brain hears all these bits start and stop together and says "that's a flute".
So it's the same process, really: simple bits adding together. But "flute sound" isn't the atom. It's made up of a bunch of simple waves already added together, which then gets added to the other sounds that sound like pianos or guitars, which produces the final mix.
I don't know if you'll get anything out of it, but you could look up videos of a "modular synth" setting up a trumpet sound or something. These devices have simple electronic tone generators, but by layering them and plugging them into each other, and using effects and the like, they can start to mimic the timbre of a trumpet or whatever. By essentially adding together the "key bits" of the harmonics (these other waves) they can start to approach the feeling of a trumpet sound, but just with simple, raw, parts.
stelelor@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 254d
So it's not the record or the CD or whatever that is magic. It's our brains. Holy shit that is so cool. Thank you for explaining it so well!
psycotica0@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 254d
Yeah! It's dope. With this new understanding I'll circle back around. In an indirect sense the groove of a record represents how far our eardrum should be from its "silent resting position" over time. That's it. The brain is what takes that complicated signal that varies over time and makes something it recognizes out of it.
And then the information encoded on a CD, or magnetic tape, or in a compressed audio file is just the same thing: distance of eardrum from neutral over time.
Oh, and stereo and surround sound and all that is just different audio tracks that play out of different speakers at a synchronized time. Again, it's our brain that notices it hears a flute in the left ear very slightly before it hears it in the right ear and thus feels like that means there's a flute to our left. But there's nothing "flute left" about either individual signal, they're just different audio that we detected a slight difference in from ear to ear.
davidagain@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 255d
Definitely, but you only ever perceive all that because of the one-dimenaional way your eardrums vibrate, and they vibrate because the air next to them vibrates. If we make the air next to your eardrums vibrate in the same pattern they did when the band were performing, you will hear and perceive the same sound as the band made.
You should be aware that an amplified band is only ever making sound at you through a bunch of speakers whose only function is to vibrate air in a one dimensional pattern.
Separating that all out into different instruments and people and timbres etc is the clever bit, and your brain does that, not the speaker, and you largely learned it as a child.
stelelor@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 254d
This is fascinating. I never realized that sound is processed like this. Not that different from sight then, which is processing a bunch of electromagnetic frequencies.
autriyo@feddit.org · 3 pts · 255d
In theory an infinite amount of different waveforms. But practically speaking, no one would be able to distinguish them by ear, and even oscilloscopes have limited resolution.
Music is super complex and can't even be described by a single or a few waveforms, unless it's very simple. Another simplified way to explain all the sounds of music fitting on one "waveform" is to imagine the high frequency stuff happening in between the low frequency stuff. And usually the different instruments and voices don't happen all at once, they happen slightly one after another, or in sync but intentionally so they affect each other the "right" way. Whatever the "right" way is...
olafurp@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 255d
That's the neat part, the brain does that using some black magic. You just have to add all the sounds individual waves together and the brain deciphers it.
Ephera@lemmy.ml · -2 pts · 255d
Yeah, we just have two ear canals. Stereo is basically all your brain will get.
olafurp@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 255d
It's true that the ears receive stereo input, but brain postprocesses it to make surround sound. It uses the time difference from sound hitting your right and left ear to do some black magic and figure out at which angle the sound is coming from.
Another interesting part on this is that the brain is pretty bad at detecting whether a sound is coming from the front or back of the head so it uses visual cues and combines it with the processed sound to make it seem like it's coming from either the front or the back.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
The shape of the ear plays part in the perception of sounds that come directly from front, back, top or bottom.
Jerkface@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 255d
You can add the waveforms together mathematically. Like if you go into a graphing calculator and plot a sine at 220 hz that's an A note. Then add two more at 261(ish) and 329, baby you got yourself an A minor cookin'. That's also what the groove would look like.
ytg@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 255d
264 and 330 (exactly) if you want to justly tune it
SirHery@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 255d
Well if you put multiple waveforms above eachother the form on single waveform.(They all occupie the same space,in this case air, so they can't be "separate"). This waveform is then recorded and remastered and whatnot. But basically the waves you can see on the vinyl are the "schape" they will have in the air.
FishFace@piefed.social · 8 pts · 255d
Take it back. How does the vibrating air equate to all that? It's not like there's a drums bit of air and a vocals bit of air - the vibration is all smushed together. Your brain separates it back out again. That's why it can take training to separately hear some bits of music, or why you can't usually pick out individual voices in a choir.
ramenshaman@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 255d
That part still kinda mystifies me. I understand that it's a single waveform and you can just add together all the different waveforms of each instrument but it still blows my mind. Kinda like I sort of understand magnets but it still seems like magic.
With vinyl records it's pretty cool how it can do right and left channels. For the right channel the needle vibrates diagonally in one direction in the groove and the left channel vibrates diagonally in the other direction.
curiousaur@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 254d
Fourier transformation.
https://youtu.be/spUNpyF58BY
mika_mika@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 254d
It doesn't do it particularly well and that's how you know vinyl enthusiasts are smelling their own farts.
realitista@lemmus.org · 14 pts · 255d
Yeah it literally just the waveform in physical form. I couldn't think of a better way to visualize it.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 255d
Yeah the basic concept makes sense to me, but I'm still fascinated by the level of detail and instrumentation they can fit into those tiny grooves. It's not like midi, like a piano roll, it is playing back shit that was recorded. It's cool af.
Blackmist@feddit.uk · 7 pts · 255d
Certainly makes a lot more sense than a CD
docoptix@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 255d
and CDs are still extremely simple compared to a compression format like MP3
b34k@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
And sound better, too!
okmko@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 36 pts · 256d
The video explains how a single needle can play stereo sound, but in doing so explains how the basic idea works before going into the incredible design to do two channels.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 255d
Link is borked because of the ! at the beginning. It’s trying to pull a picture that doesn’t exist
mp3@lemmy.ca · 15 pts · 255d
As a general FYI, you can make a clickable YouTube thumbail like this
Just replace the videoID in the thumbnail and URL.
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 2 pts · 255d
I tried to duplicate what you have (which works in your example) but it broke it badly, so I left it. One day all the Fediverse will be universal in how it works.
kilgore_trout@feddit.it · 1 pts · 254d
This is about Markdown, not Fediverse.
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 1 pts · 254d
Some software clients parsing the Fediverse protocol treat some special markdowns differently. It's gotten better as new versions are updated to recognize more, but it's still a thing.
freebee@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 255d
That was very informative, thanks!
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 34 pts · 255d
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 255d
It's only weird once electrons get involved.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 255d
things get weirder when your get rid of those electron bois
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 255d
I agree, I'm still amazed that this shit works as well as it does.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
Add quantum science to the list.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 255d
ameancow@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 255d
the_mighty_kracken@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
That's Gold, Jerry!
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org · 2 pts · 255d
Tat's the neat part about it. Scientists dont understand it either.
How computers work is also some form of witchcraft. Even tho I understand the principles behind it, it still is literally magic that we get computers to execute stuff.
mech@feddit.org · 2 pts · 254d
Computers run on magical smoke.
Proof: When the smoke comes out, the computer doesn't work anymore.
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org · 3 pts · 254d
That's how basically all electronics work
Malfeasant@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
Computers are easy, they just do math really really fast. The weird part is how useful math is.
derry@midwest.social · 2 pts · 255d
Ah well except it's really rocks being excited enough to do math.
Zerush@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 255d
Nobody understand Quantum mechanics, scientifics only know what it do, but not how.
Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 255d
How about this one to blow your mind further:
This urn from 1552.
Because of how it was made, they could play back the sounds around the potter who fabricated it.
I thought they had done the same with some Roman parchment, but all I can find are links to stories on that one.
stardom8048@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 255d
Interesting, but I think this is largely discredited from the brief research I did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics#Discredited_theories
Cool idea nonetheless.
fistac0rpse@fedia.io · 4 pts · 255d
Doesn't really discredit it based on that, but thanks for the article
Valmond@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 255d
That's a lot of screaming!
Actually this is one of the coolest things I have ever seen or heard, thank you!
ramenshaman@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 255d
Holy crap that's wild
realitista@lemmus.org · 3 pts · 255d
What the hell are the sounds supposed to be?
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 255d
Someone playing a recorder or flute like instrument?
Or some one was being tortured.
tamal3@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
The description says it's a violin
kandoh@reddthat.com · 22 pts · 254d
What's crazy to me is that this technology was used for only a few dozen years before it was replaced and for thousands of years beforehand there was nothing like it
percent@infosec.pub · 7 pts · 254d
It's also interesting that it has made somewhat of a comeback after some newer technologies have faded away
fubarx@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 255d
Agent641@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
Calvins' dads' explanations were very influential to my shitposting career
JimVanDeventer@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 255d
Sound is vibration. A record is a vibration frozen in place.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 255d
yhea, i can bs, those vynils are usually at room temperature
Bluewing@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 255d
It's 4:30am and thanks to this thread I'm listening to Dave Brubeck on vinyl........
BoosBeau@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 255d
Just count to five and you'll be alright
Bluewing@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
No, it's better to count 1,2,3,4 - 1,2,3 to keep the beat. (I've preformed Take 5 with a Jazz band).
fossilesque@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 255d
Agent641@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 255d
A cello is just a bit of wood with some stringy Bois, but it sounds like heaven and hell and everything in-between when played right.
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org · 17 pts · 255d
Records are very easy to understand. Even without a microscope, you can see periodic patterns on test vinyls with beeps. And sound being periodic motion is also obvious from string and percussive instruments.
You can even see tracks starting and ending on pressed CDs under the right lighting with your own eyes. I wonder, is the encoding of silence (approx. 2 seconds) really that different or does the density of grooves or pit/land pattern intentionally differ to help the player seek there faster? I know that uncompressed audio naturally results in a repeated pattern when silence is encoded but given the 8-to-14 modulation and other error correctiion techniques, I find it hard to believe it would result in significantly different density unless they specifically added a special mode just for encoding silence that makes the track brighter-colored for easier coarse seeking.
Madison420@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 255d
Theres a graphic somewhere I'll try to find that shows a bird call as a sound wave then a picture of record topography of the same call that makes it fairly obvious.
Gramophones are also fairly illustrative given that the needle directly acts on a diaphragm that is directly connected to a bell shaped horn.
ABetterTomorrow@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 255d
Would love to see that
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 255d
Long runs of no changes is generally undesirable because it makes it harder to know where the reader is. So you’d want some type of coding to make sure you see changes occasionally regardless of where you are. For CDs, it seems like each byte is converted into 14 bits, where the longest run of zeroes is 10.
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org · 1 pts · 255d
I know, among other things there is a time code inserted very frequently between audio data, without which seeking would not be possible at all. However, the audio uses over 90 % of the data so it's largely responsible for the overall appearance of the track.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
It doesn’t seem like there’s a pseudorandom coding applied, so repeated patterns should show up visibly. I’ve never really examined it myself though.
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org · 1 pts · 255d
Welp, I remembered this post and it's most likely valid CD-audio, just with awful noise.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
Cool! Good to know this software is out there.
SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 255d
Consider this: every record I play has a faint recording of the room, every time it has been played, since no turntable or cartridge is perfectly isolated, and, being diamond rubbing against vinyl, will leave some trace of the room sound behind.
Gaja0@lemmy.zip · 15 pts · 255d
It's really simple.
Sound is air vibrations at different strengths (volume) and frequencies (pitch). Taller waves are loud. Thinner waves are higher pitched. The math looks like this:
Volume * sin( Pitch * time)
Generally, low pitch sounds are louder and easier to see in a sound wave. A kick is really easy to spot. The rest of the weird janky movement of the sound wave is like a bunch of these equations added up to create the sound... generally.
The trick to understanding sound is that it's a difference over time. The change in pressure is registered by your brain. A record player is literally just the physical transcription of this math and the speaker is just oscillating back and forth to reproduce the sound.
Okay maybe it's not super simple, but I hope this helps.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 255d
tl;dr: magic
RaoulDuke85@piefed.social · 9 pts · 256d
Digital music is just 1s and 0s.
Jackusflackus@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 255d
Digital jazz man!
RaoulDuke85@piefed.social · 1 pts · 255d
It be what it be.
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world · 3 pts · 256d
Aww, c'mon - some digital music surely deserves a better rating than that!
BootLoop@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 255d
Some is 10/10
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world · 2 pts · 255d
I still only see two ratings.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 255d
Yeah, 10/10 or 01/10 which is 2/2 and 1/2 in decimal respectively.
ramenshaman@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
And it must be converted to analog before it goes to a speaker
Valmond@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
Enters the class D amplifier.
For what I understand, it uses the 0 and 1 directly, and just filters the result slightly.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 255d
Uhm
Texas_Hangover@lemmy.radio · 3 pts · 255d
Fucking how tho?
humorlessrepost@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 255d
Sound is just patterns of air pressure.
If you were able to go “puh puh puh” in someone’s ear 440 times per second, they’d hear a middle A note if they didn’t punch you first.
Imagine a delicate needle in front of your mouth. If you “puh” at it, it wiggles. If you play an A on a violin, the violin string wiggles 440 times per second. That vibrates the air around the string at the same speed. That air vibrates your ear drum 440 times per second, so you hear it. But it also vibrates the needle. Now let that needle carve a pattern in a spinning disc. That pattern of pressure is now recorded. If you harden that disc and balance a needle over it and spin it again at the same speed, the needle will vibrate 440 times per second. You can use that to make a big floppy piece of paper vibrate 440 times per second. That vibrates the air, which vibrates your ear drum just like the original violin string would’ve.
prex@aussie.zone · 3 pts · 255d
Magnets
okmko@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
They work because north poles find south poles hot eh eff.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 255d
How air makes sound? It moves our membrane.
Well ok, the movement is fast enough to vibrate.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub · 4 pts · 255d
It's vibes man.
null@piefed.nullspace.lol · 3 pts · 255d
It makes your eardrum wiggle in the same shape as the grooves.
Digit@lemmy.wtf · 3 pts · 255d
Some day, I'll get my (20) albums turned into vinyl.
That day moved a little closer, seeing this.
mvirts@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
By choice
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 1 pts · 255d
I mean it's pretty easy if you understand that sound is just a wave of vibration through a medium.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 255d
Everything is easy to understand if you believe in mediums I guess.
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 2 pts · 255d
Ghosts are just vibrations of the past that can only be heard through spirit mediums. 😌
Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 255d
Im more of an extra large.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 255d
You hear about the dwarf psychic that escaped prison?
He's a small medium at large
Valmond@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
In Stereo too...
n3m37h@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 256d
Dig that groove baby
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
Beep bop beep boop beep
Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
I still don't get how headphones work and thats always bugged me. how digital files translate into sound and how a little speaker makes that sound.
Natanael@infosec.pub · 2 pts · 255d
Have you seen mechanical music boxes?
The ones and zeroes and bumps and flat areas
SirActionSack@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 255d
Have you ever made sounds by wobbling a board? It's like that but the magnet is better at wobbling the board precisely.
Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
it still blows my mind it can make literally any sound.
Hikermick@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 255d
What's that a picture of? Doesn't like a needle and vinyl to me
als@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 255d
It looks like an electron microscope image, hence it being black and white and so close up
biggeoff@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 255d
If I'm not mistaken it's from a shot by the YouTube channel Applied Science. Ben is an absolute genius
Hikermick@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 255d
A microscope? That must be a tiny record player. The needle arm looks like it's made of clay
SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 255d
I'm a microbiologist. That's pretty normal. Things that look smooth and even when viewed normally frequently look different when significantly magnified. Your eyes can't resolve the fine details so your brain fills in the gaps.