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YouTubers React to Experimental Music

🕑 Added 2019-09-09 16:52:22 +0000 UTC

Comments

Tom Loredo

This was so cool! I can't imagine any other YouTuber producing something like this, simultaneously fun, intellectually stimulating, and wonder-inducing. I wonder how much of this is really due to nonlinearity and due to ear physiology. Mathematically, the (linear!) sum of sinusoids with two frequencies f1 and f2 is exactly the same as a single sinusoid at the higher frequency f1+f2, modulated in amplitude by a sinusoid at the lower frequency |f1-f2| (if you ever took a trig class, you learned this as an identity). Mathematically, it's just a matter of interpretation whether you think of it as two superposed sine waves, or one amplitude-modulated sine wave. Perceptually, I suspect there are different regimes where our brains prefer one interpretation to the other. And in a normal musical setting, where no two sources are ever perfectly in tune and coherent (so you never really have two perfect sinusoids summing), I would guess the brain would make the "two pitches" interpretation. Does the composition use coherent sources for the music, or is it performed on instruments? —Tom (with my "day job" astronomer/statistician/signal processing expert hat on)