Questions regarding applied waves?

[zell_D]

in class today, we hit a tuning fork and tried to match it with a humming. now what I Want to know is that is this even possible? we tried a lot of times and tried to produce a sine wave but failed horribly. although at the max amplitude, the frequency of our hum matched with that of the tuning fork... does that count lol?

we also did eeeee's and aaaaa's, but they are all different, i guess this is what's suppose to happen?

we also did hiss's, which someone bought up to be "White noise". but i thought white noises are suppose to have all frequencies present with equal amplitudes... although all freqs were present, their amplitudes weren't exactly the same (although close). why is that?

thanks

 

[AtticusFinch]

You couldn't produce a perfect sine wave because while a tuning fork produces just the fundamental frequency the human voice produces multiple harmonics in addition giving it it's distinctive sound.

There's a good MIT online video with a professor putting the sound of several instruments through an oscilloscope and showing the resulting waves.

I'll look into the white noise question, I don't know that much about it.

 

[zell_D]

bump :X