this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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So there's this thing called a Fourier series...
Basically any wave can be created by adding together individual frequencies, and with some fancy math it's possible to go the other way with a Fourier transform and get how loud every frequency is (like is displayed in a spectrogram).
I think the real black magic is in how our ears and brains can decode the mess of information coming in and identify meaningful patterns.
A nice related bookmark I have saved. There's also interactive pert with a slider where you can draw a wave and then add more and more sinusoids to get closer and closer. And of course the square wave, with infinite sinusoids (theoretically).
https://www.jezzamon.com/fourier/
This reminds me, Bartosz Ciechanowski has an explainer about the whole sound thing.