What the actual funk is a sine wave? From a beatmaker’s perspective, when you hear sine wave, you should think, “No sudden movement.” If you’re like me, they explain this to you in math class, and it went completely over your head. But it’s super simple.
There’s a relationship between the motion of a pendulum and a circle. Think of a clock. Track the vertical position on the minute hand as it goes around the face of a clock, and you’ve just measured it sine.
Seriously. That’s it. How much do we care about sine waves?
Well, it turns out quite a lot. In our digital lives, we encounter a lot of switches, which accounts for this square wave. But in nature, things don’t tend to behave that way.
You can take a sine wave to mean no sudden movements. Any kinks, sharp turns, pointy things along this waveform, you can interpret as high-frequency content piggybacking along a lower frequency signal. And if you’re interpreting that as a second sound, you’re right, and you just got it.
Because any sound you hear can be described by combining sine waves of different frequencies, making them the atomic level building blocks for everything you hear. Like that? Follow me, Kitchen.
Come study with me.
