John Fields wrote:
On Sat, 14 Jul 2007 23:43:55 +0200, "Hein ten Horn" wrote:
Ron Baker, Pluralitas! wrote:
Hein ten Horn wrote:
Ron Baker, Pluralitas! wrote:

How do you arrive at a "beat"?

Not by train, neither by UFO.
Sorry. English, German and French are only 'second'
languages to me.
Are you after the occurrence of a beat?

Another way to phrase the question would have been:
Given a waveform x(t) representing the sound wave
in the air how do you decide whether there is a
beat in it?

Oh, nice question. Well, usually (in my case) the functions
are quite simple (like the ones we're here discussing) so that
I see the beat in a picture of a rough plot in my mind.

And what does it look like, then?

Roughly like the ones in your Excel(lent) plots.

Then: a beat appears at constructive interference, thus
when the cosine function becomes maximal (+1 or -1).
Or are you after the beat frequency (6 Hz)?
Then: the cosine function has two maxima per period
(one being positive, one negative) and with three
periodes a second it makes six beats/second.

Hint: Any such assessment is nonlinear.

Mathematical terms like linear, logarithmic, etc. are familiar
to me, but the guys here use linear and nonlinear in another
sense.

Where is "here"?

In this thread.

I'm writing from sci.electronics.basics

Subscribing to that group would be a good
thing to do, I suspect.

and, classically, a device
with a linear response will provide an output signal change over its
linear dynamic range which varies as a function of an input signal
amplitude change and some system constants and is described by:


Y = mx+b


Where Y is the output of the system, and is the distance traversed
by the output signal along the ordinate of a Cartesian plot,

m is a constant describing the slope (gain) of the system,

x is the input to the system, is the distance traversed by
the input signal along the abscissa of a Cartesian plot, and

b is the DC offset of the output, plotted on the ordinate.

In the context of this thread, then, if a couple of AC signals are
injected into a linear system, which adds them, what will emerge
from the output will be an AC signal which will be the instantaneous
arithmetic sum of the amplitudes of both signals, as time goes by.

In general: that sum times a constant factor.
Perhaps the factor being one is usually tacitly assumed.

As nature would have it, if the system was perfectly linear, the
spectrum of the output would contain only the lines occupied by the
two inputs.

Kinda like if we listened to some perfectly recorded and played back
music...

If the system is non-linear, however, what will appear on the output
will be the AC signals input to the system as well as some new
companions.

Those companions will be new, real frequencies which will be located
spectrally at the sum of the frequencies of the two AC signals and
also at their difference.

From physics (and my good old radio hobby)
I'm familiar with the phenomenon. The meanwhile
cleared using of the word non-linear in a narrower
sense made me sometimes too careful, I guess.

Something to do with harmonics or so? Anyway,
that's why the hint isn't working here.

Harmonics _and_ heterodynes.

If the hint isn't working then you must confess ignorance, yes?

The continuous thread was clear to me.

Thanks.

gr, Hein