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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.
He said never. That’s an order.
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.
Ah, very similar to the camera (iconograph) filled with fast painting imps.
That may or may not have been my inspiration
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 because you played the boring album version, instead of the one and only 1973 live version.
GNU Sir Terry
A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.
Death can’t have him.
I heard their team-building theme song was Madonna’s Into the Groove.
It’s so simple
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
It’s also interesting that it has made somewhat of a comeback after some newer technologies have faded away
Simple. Sounds are vibrations. The grooves make the needle vibrate. Those vibrations are amplified.
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.
Alternative answer: magic
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.
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!
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.
your brain does that, not the speaker
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.
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.
Yeah, we just have two ear canals. Stereo is basically all your brain will get.
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.
The shape of the ear plays part in the perception of sounds that come directly from front, back, top or bottom.
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.
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.
264 and 330 (exactly) if you want to justly tune it
Fourier transformation.
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.
It doesn’t do it particularly well and that’s how you know vinyl enthusiasts are smelling their own farts.
Yeah it literally just the waveform in physical form. I couldn’t think of a better way to visualize it.
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.
Certainly makes a lot more sense than a CD
and CDs are still extremely simple compared to a compression format like MP3
And sound better, too!
deleted by creator
Anything sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
I’m convinced this is magic.
It’s only weird once electrons get involved.
things get weirder when your get rid of those electron bois
I agree, I’m still amazed that this shit works as well as it does.
Add quantum science to the list.
I’ve watched some yt videos about quantum mechanics. I am FAR too dumb to understand even a few words of what they were talking about lol
Quantum mechanics are the dreams that stuff is made of.
That’s Gold, Jerry!
Nobody understand Quantum mechanics, scientifics only know what it do, but not how.
It’s 4:30am and thanks to this thread I’m listening to Dave Brubeck on vinyl…
Just count to five and you’ll be alright
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).
It’s for science.
](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DdUvoc7tJ4)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.
Link is borked because of the ! at the beginning. It’s trying to pull a picture that doesn’t exist
As a general FYI, you can make a clickable YouTube thumbail like this
[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DdUvoc7tJ4)Just replace the videoID in the thumbnail and URL.
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.
This is about Markdown, not Fediverse.
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.
That was very informative, thanks!
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.
Sound is vibration. A record is a vibration frozen in place.
yhea, i can bs, those vynils are usually at room temperature
How about this one to blow your mind further:
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.
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.
Doesn’t really discredit it based on that, but thanks for the article
That’s a lot of screaming!
Actually this is one of the coolest things I have ever seen or heard, thank you!
Holy crap that’s wild
What the hell are the sounds supposed to be?
Someone playing a recorder or flute like instrument?
Or some one was being tortured.
The description says it’s a violin
Calvins’ dads’ explanations were very influential to my shitposting career
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.
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.
tl;dr: magic
Digital music is just 1s and 0s.
Digital jazz man!
It be what it be.
Aww, c’mon - some digital music surely deserves a better rating than that!
Some is 10/10
I still only see two ratings.
Yeah, 10/10 or 01/10 which is 2/2 and 1/2 in decimal respectively.
And it must be converted to analog before it goes to a speaker
Enters the class D amplifier.
For what I understand, it uses the 0 and 1 directly, and just filters the result slightly.
Uhm
- ridges cause movement of needle
- gets mechanic/electrically amplified
- causes movement of membrane in speaker
- the membrane moves air = sound
Fucking how tho?
Magnets
They work because north poles find south poles hot eh eff.
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.
How air makes sound? It moves our membrane.
Well ok, the movement is fast enough to vibrate.
