nice read.
Reminds me of when I started a song using a sine wav sampled across a 88keyboard which was sampled inside my akai S5000. I'm forgetting if the wav was normalized, but I noticed when playing different chords, that just combining different intervals would cause distortion, which wasn't related to clipping, though it might have.
That's why I found the last part of this post interesting, just fathoming the idea of two wavs which are blending creating the phenomenom of 'beating'. Maybe that's what I was hearing.
Anyway,
Those chords I played, I doubled up with a 'string' preset from an old FM synth, the Yamaha tx81z, so it masked the bare sounds of the sine from the sampler.
Here's the song im refering to:
http://jdsy.bandcamp.com/track/kinda-in ... iginal-mixI also notice that my ears hear the mix differently... that such a basic sound (sine) makes your discrepancy between ear damage or ear uniquness more obviously.
Thanks for checking it out!
A song based on the joy of SINE WAVS!!!!!!!!!