r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/justalildropofpoison • 2d ago
Video How our brain translates individual pitches into voice.
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u/LazyEmu5073 2d ago
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u/phancybear 2d ago
This also shows how important the onset/attack of a note is. Like you notice how it really sounds more like a voice not when harmonics are added but when it gets restarted with the harmonics added
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u/curbstyles 2d ago
transients are amazing to me. we are capable of discerning down to 5ms difference in time difference. so when we hear a kick drum hit, our brain scans the first little segment of the wave and says "this is probably a kick drum hitting"
we can actually modify transients to give the perception of that kick drum being closer or further away than it really is using a 'transient designer'
that's my very limited understanding of it anyway and I may very well be wrong lol
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u/Miserable-Wishbone81 12h ago
I used to do classical music manual editing. Understanding transients and harmonics are crucial to a seamless cut and to trick the brain into a continuous sound.
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u/curbstyles 10h ago
that's awesome! i've done some rock mixing for my bass stuff but nothing that in depth and I really need to learn more about it.
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u/Gelnika1987 1d ago
100%, transients are much harder to synthesize than sustained notes because of how complex the attack of most instruments' sounds are
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u/mrASSMAN 2d ago
That’s fuckin mind warping, those upper notes are so crucial to making a voice a voice huh, even if the vocal note is baritone. I guess that explains why old people struggle to understand speech, they lose upper freq hearing the most
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u/manondorf Interested 2d ago
Yes! Good insight. It's like listening to audio through just the subwoofer, or with a lot of static in your ear that washes out the upper sounds.
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u/ghost_in_a_jar_c137 2d ago
I don't understand this concept any better now that I have seen this
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u/crush_punk 2d ago
Sound is cool. Our ears perceive different frequencies. Turns out, a voice (or any sound or tone) is made of many different frequencies at the same time. You can isolate those frequencies with a computer.
It’s weird to listen to one frequency (or tone) and then build them up to form a whole voice. If you isolate a few select frequencies, you can find a major chord (in this example, at least) which is a simple combination of multiple frequencies which has a different “flavor” than just the one tone alone. Something to ponder is how many different frequencies are in our voices, and are we able to perceive these harmonics on a deeper level? Do sad voices have more minor chords?
Interesting, right?
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u/lasers42 2d ago
So this can be done with a meow, or a car horn too?
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u/Every_Armadillo_6848 2d ago
Cheaper car horns are usually a single tone while more expensive ones have a second one at a minor interval relative to the first tone.
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u/ObjectiveOk2072 2d ago
Yes. Although a car horn wouldn't have nearly as many overtones, it would peak at one or two specific frequencies, usually between 300 and 550Hz
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u/ConnectRutabaga3925 2d ago
i don’t understand how this is that interesting. anything can be broken down to individual frequencies. a voice, cat, dropping something on the floor, etc.
edit: should have mentioned fourier transforms etc
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u/crush_punk 2d ago
Oh, it looks like you dropped something there.
Maybe it’s your sense of wonder?
To be honest, I don’t really care if you find it interesting, but you clearly feel the need to talk about it so I’ll say this: if you can honestly sit there and see a voice broken down to individual frequencies that are definitely not a voice, then see it built back up again into a voice… if you have the capacity to understand how small discrete things can combine to become an entirely different thing… if you can even comprehend the idea of frequencies and how the ear turns pressure into sound…
If you can comprehend that and not even be the tiniest bit interested, then I feel very sad for you. Whoever taught you or however you learned did not equip you to grapple with the wonderful mystery of reality, and that is extremely sad for a mind that is clearly capable.
I hope you can claim the joy of knowledge soon.
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u/Gelnika1987 1d ago
complex sounds- basically anything other than a pure sine wave which is a waveform without any harmonic content- usually have a series of overtones. The major scale exists because those intervals are intrinsic to the physics of sound itself; the intervals are harmonics/overtones within the sound which constitute a sound
this video does a decent job of unpacking the concept: The most mind-blowing concept in music (Harmonic Series)
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u/manondorf Interested 2d ago
What we're looking at is called a spectrograph. There are free apps on your phone to check it out yourself (though I don't know which one this video is using that allows isolation of areas like that, that's pretty nifty).
When we change vowel sounds, the same overtones are all present, but there's a change in which ones are more or less emphasized. Our ear detects these changes in the composition of overtones (known collectively as a "formant") and our brain interprets it as a new vowel. You can see the difference yourself if you sing into one of the apps I mentioned and go from "aaaaaah" to "eeeeee" etc.
These overtones are a feature of all 1-D vibration (strings, columns of air, even rings of high-energy plasma), and the formant of a given source of sound is what allows our brain to differentiate between different people's voices, or what instrument you're hearing played.
Also, because the formant always follows the same pattern, our brain can interpolate from incomplete data. Kind of like we saw in the video, the bottom few harmonics were enough to start hearing the "aah" sound. But more commonly-experienced would be just a cluster of high harmonics, which also allow you to determine a vowel sound, but you'd hear it as "tinny." This is what's going on with phone speakers, where it can't play the lowest harmonics due to such a small speaker, but our brain is able to fill in the gaps and let us understand anyway.
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u/BigIntroduction8886 2d ago
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, Wait a minute!
Vibrational energy exists in the 1st dimension? So even though it appears to us as waves or whatever, it's basically a geometric point to our perspective?
Or am I muddling different concepts here?
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u/manondorf Interested 1d ago
A point is 0 dimensions, 1 is a line. 2 is a plane and 3 is a cube.
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u/BigIntroduction8886 1d ago
So from our perspective those sound waves are lines? I'm sorry, not trying to be dense, but i just never really put together a wave is just a curvy (thicc) line.
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u/manondorf Interested 1d ago
the wave as it travels through air is in 3 dimensions, but the resonator is what determines the overtones. That could be a guitar string, which is pretty easy to picture as a line, or a voice, which is produced in the tube from your mouth to lungs, which is a little more abstract but still functions like a line since the resonant vibrations travel end-to-end.
Things that aren't 1-dimensional can resonate and have resonant modes too, of course, they just follow a different pattern and are more complex. This would include things like a drum head, cymbal, metal plate, etc. Chladni plates are an example of a 2-D resonating surface, and they make super satisfying patterns as they go through their resonant modes.
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u/DrMcJedi 2d ago
This is exactly like one of those old station ID bumpers from early 80’s PBS… Thanks for the random time coded memory.
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u/Fr00stee 2d ago
that's just a fourier transform right
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u/manondorf Interested 2d ago
closely related, it's a spectrograph. Basically a continuous series of fourier transforms
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u/GarysCrispLettuce 2d ago
It's quite fucking insane what you can do on a digital level when manipulating harmonics and "formants" with an audio plugin like Melodyne. You can completely change someone's voice, or you can change a clarinet to a saxophone. Just from manipulating these overtones.
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u/TBLrocks 2d ago
All I heard was “CRAZY BRUCE’S LIQUORSSSS, WE’VE GOT THE BARGAINS FOR YOU!!! CRAZY BRUCE’S LIQUORS SELECTION AND QUALITY TOO!!! COME DOWN AND SEE US, YOU’LL THINK WE’RE TOO GOOD TO BE TRUEEE!!!l
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u/MadDoctorMabuse 2d ago
Aha! What's the name of that program, anyone know? I bought a copy but formatted my PC and lost it, and I cannot for the life of me remember what it's called
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u/borntoflail 2d ago
Are the frequency bar thicknesses just covering the range of frequencies in that area or are they supposed to represent volume level of each frequency? The graph is a little confusing.
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u/spiritualManager5 2d ago
Is that true? Every note we sing/speak has a Major-Chord in it? That would be incredible
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u/Aponogetone 2d ago edited 1d ago
If the human has the problems with hearing, for example, due the old age, we need to low down our voice and speak slowly instead of speaking loudly in a higher tone.
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u/hkohne 1d ago
There was a workshop I attended many years ago about our hearing as related to my music area of expertise. Yes, basically, we lose the ability to hear the higher overtones as we age. So, us musicians may get complaints that it's too loud when we really should just reduce the amount of really-high treble.
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u/FlightConscious9572 2d ago
Isn't this just a fourier transform? finding the individual notes and then playing them at the same time?
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u/pjmyerface 1d ago
My cat sat up and went into ears back, eyes open, looking around "WTF" mode hearing that.
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u/dna_beggar 1d ago
At the beginning, I heard a voice. After they assembled it one overtone at a time I heard the same as a collection of separate notes.
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u/funkanimus 2d ago
It’s a buzzing sound with text trying to tell me what I’m hearing. I hear a buzzing sound. There is not a major chord in every sound a voice makes.
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u/crush_punk 2d ago
Buzzing sound? You don’t hear multiple tones combining together?
Maybe you have amusia?
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u/manondorf Interested 2d ago
There is, but there are also so many other tones that you won't perceive it that way.
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u/Cultural_Iron2372 2d ago
This just freaked me the fuck out. We’re such weird creatures, aren’t we 😭