Playing a Spectral Selection

[Gale Andrews]

Thanks, Robert.

If then there is no playback when low and high frequency is the same, perhaps you should throw that error (but customize it a little, that you cannot play zero bandwidth). If you did play a zero bandwidth frequency, though, would you hear it?


Gale

[steve]

"Zero bandwidth" is like having an object that has zero width (infinitely thin).
Just as an infinitely thin object exists conceptually as a "plane", so an infinitely narrow bandwidth exists conceptually.
It could be argued that a pure sine tone has "infinitely narrow bandwidth", and that a pure sine tone could be extracted from noise by filtering through an infinitely narrow band-pass filter, but the level of the sine tone produced this way would be infinitely low amplitude (absolute silence).

It's not possible to produce an absolutely "pure" sine tone as sound (it would require zero distortion and zero noise), though it's possible to get pretty close. It's also impossible to achieve a totally flat and thin plane.