PSYC56H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Musical Tone, Surround Sound, Decibel
Document Summary
Recall: periodic waves have recurring patterns, aperiodic waves do not. Two kinds of periodic waves: sine waves: single periodic waves (ex. Pure tones: complex waves: waves made up of combinations of sine waves, simple: pure, complex: composed, continuous: noise, transient: like a clap, onset decay. Sine waves are fundamental because they combine together to form complex sounds and sound qualities, like timbre. Likewise, you can decompose complex sounds into their sine wave components using fourier analyses. Derived from the same sources connected together, like surround-sound systems), the pressures of the sound sources can be simply added together. Caveat #1: this does not work for uncorrelated sources. Time domain: a representation of a wave as a function of time. Examples of this are waveforms and spectrograms/sonograms: spectrogram haves" frequency on y-axis, time on x-axis. Frequency domain: a representation of a wave as a function of its frequency.
