Posted by Wayne Parham on April 05, 2003 at 14:26:15

In Reply to: A Really Stupid Question posted by wunhuanglo on April 05, 2003 at 10:03:42:

You never hear an instantaneous pressure. That's what is the result of any instantaneous voltage applied to a loudspeaker. Instead, you hear exactly what you described - a series of pressure changes.

And I find (spkrman57) Ron's description is right on the money - that these waveforms all ride on top of each other. In fact, every signal can be reduced to a composite collection of sine waves. It can also be viewed as a holistic single wave shape. Both are accurate ways to describe a signal. But one is a "forest view" and the other is a "tree view." The "forest view" is the one that we "hear" - Maybe you could say it's the illusion we percieve. We don't hear the individual pressures or sines and only hear the whole, which requires time and space to develop within.