system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does an instrument sound so bad when it's not tuned but when people talk without being in any sort of key it sounds fine?
gpt
When people talk their voices are modulating through a range of tones for very short periods of time.


Get a lot of people talking and you get short tones at random frequencies; this is very similar to white noise, so our minds don't really assign any tone to the human voice at all.


But get people singing, where people are holding a single tones for more than ~20 milliseconds, and our minds can pick out harmony (good sound). And discordance (bad sound).