What is a sound? And What is FM Synthesis?

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going to talk about something that sounds almost phylosophical, and I won't go too much into detail, but I would just like to try to explain, to give a different point of view on what is a sound and what composes it.

A sound, and specifically in our blog we're talking about sounds that can be used to make music, is a wave that starts from a source and arrives to the human ear.

Let's imagine a note, for example the C in the same octave, played with a guitar or with a piano, or with a trumpet: the note is the same, but the sound is indeed different, right?
This depends from the harmonics of that note, not from the note itself. I will re-use the same pictures I have captured for a previous article to explain it: 

This is a sine wave, only the fundamental note of a sound, without overtones.
It's the purest form a sound can be.

This fundamental note is also called basic harmonic.
If this same sound would be more complex (for example if it would pass through a guitar amplifier), we would see a serie of repetitions of this fundamental note, distributed at regular intervals towards the spectrum (these intervals compose a scale which is called Harmonic scale): we would find out that the fundamental note is the same through all the instruments, and what changes, what makes the aforementioned C distinguishable from a piano to a guitar is the interaction between the repetitions, which are called harmonics.
The harmonics that are after the fundamental one are also called "overtones". 

So we can say that everything we hear in nature is a sum of some fundamental note and its harmonics, and Frequency Modulation Synthesis is the combining, mixing and modulating various sine waves in order to try to get close to sounds existent in nature, or to create completely new ones.
That's how a Synth can recreate (sometimes sounding more realistic, sometimes sounding more "synthetic") for example a violin or a piano.

Today we are launching the new tag, "Synth", and we'll start exploring here and there also this complicated yet fascinating world.

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