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I scraped a couple of webpages, then in java converted every letter into a number zero to nine dependent on how far along the alphabet it is. I then turned these into pairs of digits.

I imported this raw into audacity, as unsigned eight bit stereo signal at a 4410 sample rate. I repeated this as I didn't have time to go through and scrape more sites right now.

The result sounds like a sine wave, with some noise.

Why?

Evanson
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    Hi Evanson, this is borderline 'off-topic' for a sound design site, perhaps I'm mistaking. Can you explain what makes this on topic? Perhaps add why you are creating the sound, which context it will be used? – Arnoud Traa Sep 06 '14 at 09:38
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    While I'd find this very exciting if it were true, I seriously doubt it's not just some artifact of the technique you used. Could you properly specify how you did it (for source code, link to GitHub Gist)? When I try to reproduce this I merely get noise, nothing sine-like. – leftaroundabout Sep 06 '14 at 15:36
  • @ArnoudTraa Why would timbre dynamics be off-topic in a sound design site? That makes no sense. This question is as on-topic as it gets. – NPN328 Sep 06 '14 at 17:00
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    No worries JCPedroza, I'm definitely not saying timbre dynamics are off-topic. I was merely asking for a clarification because the question was too vague to indicate any relation to sound design (and therefor also timbre dynamics). Constructive criticism is needed if questions are not clear. – Arnoud Traa Sep 06 '14 at 17:31
  • @ArnoudTraa The question's scope is clear, regardless of the OP's intentions. If anything it needs detail in the procedures in order to obtain any meaningful answer, but it is not vague at all. – NPN328 Sep 07 '14 at 09:23
  • 'If anything it needs detail.. ' hence my usage of the word vague. Perhaps not the best word, but i have no clue what he did, so i asked for a clarification. – Arnoud Traa Sep 07 '14 at 09:49
  • @ArnoudTraa The question is not vague, it is clear and its scope is on-topic: "why the timbre of this signal?". That's why you asking for an explanation of what makes it on-topic and calling it "borderline off-topic" make no sense to me. With 'if anything it needs detail' I was talking about the procedure detail, not suggesting that the question is vague because of lack of detail. It's clear what the asker wants to know. – NPN328 Sep 07 '14 at 17:54
  • I'm not sure what our disagreement adds to the question or answerring it. Let's agree to disagree and move on. – Arnoud Traa Sep 07 '14 at 18:22
  • The way I see it, there are two possibilities here, the first is that it is a technical problem with the way he is producing his samples, in this case, it would be a sound design issue to figure out what is wrong with the process. The other way would be that it is asking why websites have data that ends up representing a sine wave, this has nothing to do with sound design at all as it is asking why websites have a pattern that is regular. Either way, without more clarification, we don't have enough info to answer the SD question and can't tell which question it is actually asking. – AJ Henderson Sep 07 '14 at 21:49
  • @Evanson - please provide more detail about how exactly you produced the clip and we can re-open it to focus on the question of what about your procedure resulted in a sine wave being formed (if anything). When you edit the question, it will automatically be put in queue to review and re-open. – AJ Henderson Sep 07 '14 at 21:51

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Maybe that is because linguistics and/or semantics are cleverly designed. At least that is an interesting way to look at those. I'd be curious to see what the results are with different language (I guess you analyzed english, no?)

valium
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Guessing severely because you gave too little information in your question, I think you are hearing the letter E.

As shown in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency, E is the most common letter in common English by a wide margin:

Relative frequencies ordered by frequency

If you look at this chart as if it were amplitudes of tone generators at various frequencies, it is clear that "E" dominates the spectrum. If this were MPEG (or other psycho-acoustic compression) encoded in the chain, it would likely toss away harmonics below some threshold; for example, D–Z might not be carried through compression. Higher amplitude harmonics might be generating the noise.

Apart from the fundamental, there is a spike at 1Hz which is probably an abrupt transition to zero, I'd guess that that may be the point of repetition of your data.

I'd have to guess much less if you'd made the SoundCloud track downloadable, and as others have noted above, could eliminate the guessing if you gave the generating code.

msw
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    It understood it that the OP used the letters to generate audio samples, rather than frequencies. But that's just guessing on my part... – leftaroundabout Sep 07 '14 at 19:59
  • I agree, however, the letters would generate fundamental frequencies with amplitudes (roughly) corresponding to the chart. It may help if you think of the bars as drawbars on an organ or the whole chart as being an FFT analysis of the resultant signal. I'm just guessing too. – msw Sep 07 '14 at 20:09
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    Nah, that wouldn't really work. Those letter frequencies aren't periodic frequencies, just statistical frequencies, so each letter would rather generate a sort of wide band-filtered noise than sine oscillations. – leftaroundabout Sep 07 '14 at 20:12