Lesson 1 of 3

Harmonics

Goal: see how all sounds are composed of pure sine waves.

You are now playing a single sine wave in Oscillator 1. Change its frequency and level. Unmute audio to hear the result.
Add a second sine wave. Change its frequency and level. Notice how the resulting waveform changes.
Turn off the second oscillator and change the waveform to sawtooth. Notice the smooth harmonic series -- a sawtooth wave is a synthesized sound computed as the combination of all harmonics from a fundamental tone.
Try adjusting the cutoff filter -- also known as a low-pass filter. This removes higher harmonics from the sound.
Turn off the oscillator and enable the microphone. Sing or whistle or speak -- what kind of waveform does it create? Do you see harmonics?
Notice how this visualization has only one axis. Amplitude is expressed as color intensity. The y-axis is up for grabs. Try changing the visualization to Radial.
Change the visualization to Time. Notice how the x-axis is now time and the y-axis is frequency. The color intensity represents amplitude.