You’re gonna want headphones for this one. We’re taught that polarity doesn’t matter as long as everything is in phase. But here I have two sawtooth waves.
One is inverted, and you can tell they’re identical because when we play them together, they null. Complete silence. We know the frequency content between them is exactly the same.
Yet when I play them back to back, I’m able to reliably distinguish one from the other. I’m listening for something in the low end. It’s really subtle.
But the first one sounds a little bit deeper. It’s almost as if there’s an overtone that’s a tiny bit sharp when inverted. I’d say it’s the first overtone, which feels like it’s pulling from a C to a C sharp.
Now, I know that isn’t actually happening, but something is happening. My working hypothesis is that it has to do with the ballistics of the actual speaker, or maybe the slew rate of the amplifier. But this experiment is gonna make me pause the next time I reach to invert the polarity of a kick drum.
Do you hear it too? Those of you who are coming here for answers are missing half the fun because the questions are where it’s at. And if someone who’d like talking about this kind of thing in a Beat Kitchen class, share this post.
