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In Reply to: Why does a violin sound different than a guitar? posted by benhen on April 15, 2007 at 17:39:30:
Short answer: as others have written, different instruments are different sizes, shapes, methods of playing, etc. Or to compare vocalists, Robert Plant and Bob Dylan, different shapes of vocal cords, different lung capacities, different builds of the chest's resonant cavity, etc.Longer answer: Pitch is an abstraction generated by the brain. A sound wave in most cases is not a pure pitch (unless you are listening to a signal generator). The brain is able to hear many types of sound and pick out a pitch like C or F.
This is like the many shades of red. You can look at a hundred colors and they will all be red, but no two will be the same. That is also an abstraction of the brain. And it is cultural as well.
What is the same in the many sound waves that are heard as a C note is that they all have the same fundamental frequency. Beyond that, they can be very different and still be heard as a C. Harmonics, attack, decay, sustain...just because a sound is a C does not mean much as to how it is going to sound. You need much more information.
Follow Ups:
Yes - I was looking for your longer answer - but makes me wonder if all tone generators sound the same - or should sound the same, theoretically.
It's extremely hard to hear pure tones as sounding different through different amps into the same speakers. This might be the case where all amps do sound the same. Unfortunately when it gets more complicated, the differences start to appear. And I don't understand why two theoretically clean amps will part ways and start sounding different when they measure so close, but it does to me and many others. Yet when I try a sinewave, it always just sounds like the same sinewave.
A pure tone generator is a sine wave. In theory, these should all sound the same...but our world is not theoretical.The pure sine wave may have some distortion added from the electronics. Or, even more likely, whatever speakers that are used may add a signature of their own. This would mean that you are not hearing a pure sine wave anymore...so it would not sound the same through different speakers, possibly.
If any 2 signal generators are putting out a pure sine wave (within negligible real world errors) into the same electronics and speakers, same volume level, I would expect them to sound exactly the same.
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