Occurrences
This wave pattern occurs often in nature, including ocean waves, sound waves, and light waves.
A cosine wave is said to be "sinusoidal", because which is also a sine wave with a phase-shift of π/2. Because of this "head start", it is often said that the cosine function leads the sine function or the sine lags the cosine.
The human ear can recognize single cosine waves as sounding clear because sine waves are representations of a single frequency with no harmonics; some sounds that approximate a pure sine wave are whistling, a crystal glass set to vibrate by running a wet finger around its rim, and the sound made by a tuning fork.
To the human ear, a sound that is made up of more than one sine wave will either sound "noisy" or will have detectable harmonics; this may be described as a different timbre.
Read more about this topic: Sine Wave
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