system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
When you hear a choir, are you hearing the average of all the singer's voices?

I don't know if my question makes sense. I guess I was thinking about it in terms of how it seems that if a large enough group is singing together, anything discordant isn't really audible. Actually, I don't even know if that's true. Is it? Please help?
gpt
You're hearing the sum of all the voices in the chorus, so like the average but multiplied by the number of singers.  This is because the amplitude of sound waves simply add in air, which is an example of a superposition principle.  So if one person out of twenty is off-key they'll only be 1/20 of the sound, and their mistake will get glossed over to some extent.

That being said, if everyone was a spot on copy of one singer, they would produce a louder version of that one singer.  The distinct sound of a chorus is actually caused by the fact that not everyone can sing exactly the same, they are a little out of time and a little out of tune and have slightly different timbres to their voices.  Electronic effects try to emulate this by adding a copy of a sound that has been phase or pitch shifted to itself.  It works surprisingly well, but it's hard to fake the complexity of the real thing.