Adding Harmonics

Harmonics are sine waves with frequencies that are integer multiples of a base frequency (f, 2f, 3f, 4f, …). They correspond to the different ways that a musical instrument like a pipe or a string can resonate to produce sound. A surprising fact is that if you add enough harmonics together, you can re-create any wave shape! This is known as Fourier’s Theorem, which you can read about here.

Can you adjust the sliders to create a sawtooth wave? Once you have a sawtooth wave, remove the even-numbered harmonics to create a square wave.

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