The most mind-blowing concept in music (Harmonic Series)

"All musicians are unconscious mathematicians" -Thelonius monk

4:39 "What the [sine wave] is a sine wave?" clever, Andrew, clever.

The coolest thing for me is that variations in harmonics is also how we pronounce different vowels. When we change the shape and position of the mouth and tongue, we create a different "instrument" that prioritises different harmonics. Basically different vowels are the result of filtering and boosting specific overtones.

Honestly this was the first thing I wanted to figure out when learning music theory. Learning WHY things sound good together is so much more important to me than learning HOW to put things together.

"or you already knew about this, in which case, why are you watching" because you're Andrew Huang

Me as a child: "I'll never need math, I'm gonna be a musician." Math: "Get back here, you little sh*t"

It’s wild to think that each note is essentially a chord on a micro level🤯

Just going down the music theory rabbit hole and was just unable to grock how the same pitch sounds different in different instruments and this finally cleared it up for me.

Fools out here buying 10k worth of gear while I'm creating the perfect tone by meticulously layering sin waves on top of eachother entirely for free

Part 2: Amount of overtones is important, but how their loudness changes over time and how the pitch wobbles is the other half of a timbre

Most mind blowing thing that I learned recently in music is: Keys/Chords are only relevant to the most recent chord that you transitioned from. Think about that. That means chord number 3 can be totally bonkers from chord number 1 as long as chord 2 works to give you the feel you want when you transition from 1 to 2, and similarly works to give you the feel you want from chord 2 transition to 3. This is how great musicians use the circle of fifths to bounce around from literally wherever they are to wherever they want to be.

Former opera singer, now digging into instrumental music and music production, from orchestral to the 80s synths of my childhood. This video utterly blew my mind, and was even news to my wife who has a Masters in music performance. GREAT video, clearly, concisely, and enjoyably explained. And you can't ask for more than that when it comes to education.

Literally just finished harmonics in physics 😂😂 this is really helpful for that actually, cheers!

Other MIND-BLOWING facts: - The reason sometimes sounds start clipping after you EQ them subtracting harmonics (which seems absurd), is that the harmonics you removed were interacting with the others and they were actually lowering the peaks of the waveform! - Two waveforms may have the exact same harmonics with the the exact same intensity yet sound completely different, because the harmonics are phased differently (the sine waves do not "align" the same way), so with a bunch of harmonics you'll still be able to obtain infinite sounds! EDIT: I substituted the term "interfering", which was technically incorrect, with "interacting". EDIT 2: Editing the comment made me lose the Heart from Andrew 😭😭 what we do for science

Andrew my man, you are king. I’m a sound therapy practitioner, and your understanding of sound that you pull into your creation and producing is exactly what the world needs. When we look at everything in creation, EVERYTHING IS VIBRATION. Sound and music, using the laws of resonance is going to be HUGE in the near future for emotional and physical healing. (The physical body is a reflection of the emotional state, the more our nervous system is in a coherent state, the body functions in a homeostatic state.) the better we feel emotionally, the better our bodies function. Love all that you do!!!!!

The way you visualized it on the guitar was brilliant. That edit made it so clear and easy to understand! 1:53

7:45 I HAVE NEVER CONSIDERED THAT. That makes SO MUCH SENSE

Andrew, I've been teaching music theory for years and have taught the harmonic series to some of my high school classes. Usually unsatisfactorily. Ive never seen it presented well in a reasonable timeframe. I used to use Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Harvard Lectures series clip of him demonstrating it on a piano. Charming if you love LB but terribly, grossly out of date for students today. This is the BEST video resource on the harmonic series I've ever come across BY FAR. Thank you so much.

As an amateur musician and professional artist-designer, i see so many relations between sounds and colors, and visual and musical composition. Your explanation of chords and harmonic series makes me think of Impressionist paintings, of Monet and Renoir, and how our eyes naturally mix contiguous colors into one. And color afterimages as well, which is why when we fixate our eyes on a red dot and then look away, we see green, the complementary color of red - just like the harmonic series. Thanks for the amazing video!

Comparing those 2 major thirds is mind blowing. The fact that the one that we’re used to is “wrong.” But when we hear the just intonation version, it sounds a bit more subdued and calmed, and of course darker. It actually sounds less dissonant once you hear it more.