[murphyv310]

Originally Posted by kalee20

The third harmonic is indeed an octave and a fifth (musically) and does sound 'interesting'. But add successive odd harmonics and you soon get unpleasant dissonance. (Even harmonics do the same, but by the time you get dissonance the frequencies are much higher and generally get lost, or are above upper hearing frequency range).

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Music in it's raw state (not passed through anything electronic) is full of all sorts of harmonics, without harmonics everything would just be sine waves without the colouration that you get from instruments acoustics (halls, rooms) etc!