Friday, June 6, 2008

The Harmonic of the Fundamental

If you take a particular signal (13 Hz, for example) and you multiply it by 2, you get an octave. If you multiply that by 3, you get a perfect fifth. If you multiply that by 5, you get a major third. If you multiply that by 72, you get the six octaves and a perfect fifth up from your original 13 Hz. If you plot a bunch of these on graph paper in colored pencils (to designate different wave forms), you get my day. Each horizontal square is one second; each vertical square is one harmonic (the first square is 13 Hz, second is 26 Hz, third is 39 Hz, etc.) Blue is a sine wave (obviously), orange is sawtooth, red is triangle, green is parabola, yellow is pulse, and brown is noise with an added sine wave for color. Brown only comes in the 64th harmonic, by the way.

And if you keep wondering to yourself, Why do I keep reading this blog, when it's usually unintelligible rambling about waves and ultimately irritating noises?, then I'll tell you why: Cousin photos.



It's only a minute long; it's not like you haven't listened to more irritating things for 60 seconds.



http://www.willamette.edu/~acsmith/struktur.mp3

5 comments:

nancy said...

So I look at the blog and yell, "How cute!" to Chris, who then asked me to read him the blog. I say, "13 Hz. . .sine waves. . .sawtooth. . ." and Chris goes, "Oh, yeah, uh huh, [blah, blah, blah] two to the sixth, by the way." Wow. It'll keep him up tonight.

Unknown said...

hahaha that is great. music is annoying though. you were right. there is something about sine waves...

molls said...

half of me is like, okay, that's interesting, and the other half thinks it sounds like the "This is just a test" thing that pops up on the TV screen right in the middle of a really good show.
the two halves have yet to reach a final verdict.

Adam said...

overwhelming handsomeness
5.0

Adam said...

overwheling handsomeness
5.0