system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
When I listen to a song, do I hear one sound wave, or a bunch of sound waves (i.e. for each instrument)?

Is there a separate sound wave for say, guitar, voice, piano, bass, etc., or are all of the sounds combined into one wave? Is this even a relevant question or am I missing the whole concept? Does the mastering process have any bearing on this?
gpt
All of the waves from the different instruments add together into a single wave. It's actually kind of interesteing that even though they're all just added on top of each other our ears and brain are able to pick the different sounds out from the mixture. Mathematically you can see how this disentangling is performed by a fourier transform.