Anatomy of Sound

The building blocks of a sound in seven parts: a single frequency, overtones, waveform, resonance, interval, envelope and, finally, a sound that brings them all together. Each part is a full listening session with a four-step panel beside it: listen, guess, see the sound's spectrum, listen again. There is no claim of any effect; this is a journey in listening and the physics of sound.

Why this order? The first stage is the material of sound: a single sine (220, 440 and 110 Hz), its exact multiples (from 440 Hz to 1760 Hz) and four waveforms at the same pitch. The second stage shapes the sound: a resonant filter whose peak travels between 300 Hz and 3 kHz, the ratios 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 and 5:4, then four different envelopes at the same pitch. In the third stage everything comes together in a single 110 Hz sound, which you can open and change in the listening room. Seven parts, 56 minutes in all; no headphones needed.

0/7 stops completed

3 stages, 7 sound stops; a filled circle is a stop you have listened to.

Stop 01/07 · I Material

The First Vibration

6 minEvidence level S: Soundscape, no claim

A single sine: the pitch is set by frequency alone.

Parts

Evidence level S: Soundscape, no claimDetails
Evidence level S: Soundscape, no claimDetails
Evidence level S: Soundscape, no claimDetails
Evidence level S: Soundscape, no claimDetails
Evidence level S: Soundscape, no claimDetails
Evidence level S: Soundscape, no claimDetails
Evidence level S: Soundscape, no claimDetails

Parts are not locked; progress stays on this device. The parts are listening practice with no claim of any effect. You can see how each session was made in its details.

Sources

The explanations in the parts rest on these sources; they make no claim of any effect. The citations were checked against Crossref, PubMed or the publisher's record.

Frequency and pitch, the harmonic series, timbre: a standard textbook of auditory perception (I-III).
Moore BCJ. An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing. Brill; 2013. ISBN 9789004252424
Equal-loudness contours: the ear is less sensitive to low frequencies (the levels in The First Vibration).
Suzuki Y, Takeshima H. Equal-loudness-level contours for pure tones. J Acoust Soc Am. 2004;116(2):918-933. doi:10.1121/1.1763601 PMID 15376658
How intervals fuse: beating between adjacent partials and the critical band (Interval and Ratio).
Plomp R, Levelt WJM. Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth. J Acoust Soc Am. 1965;38(4):548-560. doi:10.1121/1.1909741 PMID 5831012
The part an onset transient plays in identifying an instrument (The Life of a Sound).
Saldanha EL, Corso JF. Timbre Cues and the Identification of Musical Instruments. J Acoust Soc Am. 1964;36(11):2021-2026. doi:10.1121/1.1919317
The dimensions of timbre: spectral distribution and attack (The Colour of Sound, The Life of a Sound).
Grey JM. Multidimensional perceptual scaling of musical timbres. J Acoust Soc Am. 1977;61(5):1270-1277. doi:10.1121/1.381428 PMID 560400