Beats Working
Beats Working
Musicians take advantage of a phenomenon called beating when they tune their instruments to a reference pitch. If two tones are very close in pitch—but not exactly the same—their combination has a pulsating or beating quality. The rate of the beating is exactly the difference between the two frequencies. Getting in tune, for the musician, is just a simple matter of getting rid of the beats.
Move the blue frequency slider to various positions and hit the "play beating tone" button to hear the beating between the blue tone and the reference red tone. The cursor slider at the bottom is there to convince you that the red and blue waveforms do indeed sum to the green, beating waveform. The blue phase slider demonstrates that the rate of the beating is not affected by the two tones' phase relationship.