If you add together two sinusoidal waves of different frequencies, how do you calculate the frequency of the resulting function as perceived by a human?
How to calculate the perceived frequency of two sinusoidal waves added together?
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trigonometry
signal-processing
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0What does "as perceived by a human" mean? I'm at least half serious. – 2012-06-28
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0@ZevChonoles: Maybe it would be clearer to talk about the tone that a human hears. Maybe you could rephrase this as "What is the frequency of the sinusoidal wave that has the same tone as this sound?" – 2012-06-28
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0Yes, but there would in fact be a range of frequencies within which any human would perceive indistinguishable tones. There is no exact answer to any question about the real world. I would recommend you remove that aspect of your question. – 2012-06-28
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0Is there a good way to calculate something like the center of that range of frequencies? – 2012-06-28
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0You wouldn't know what the exact range of frequencies is, either, and you'd only find out the (approximation of the) range by doing an experiment, not with math. – 2012-06-28
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0See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_%28acoustics%29 – 2012-06-28
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0@IlmariKaronen: The beat frequency isn't actually the frequency of the tone, is it? – 2012-06-28
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0@yakiv: The beat frequency is the difference of the frequencies of the two tones (the frequency of the amplitude modulation). – 2012-06-28
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0Lossy compression schemes such as MP3 rely on the fact that the human brain cannot perceive individual frequencies when spaced closely enough. I never really learned how this works, but here's a link you may find interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics – 2012-06-29
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0And another which goes into details: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=388209&tag=1 – 2012-06-29