[nullc]

Acoustic "beat tones" aren't "real" tones— you hear them because of non-linearies in the ear-brain system, but you have to hear the initial tones first. (Well, unless you're talking >>130dB SPL levels where the air starts becoming non-linear, but then lower frequency recording would capture it fine)

If you could hear subharmonic beats from ultrasonics then it would be _very_ easy to demonstrate, alas.

[zachrose]

Curious, what does non-linear mean in this context?

[mseebach]

IIRC, linearity is when you put a sound wave frequency into the medium (air) a some point, you can predict the frequency of the sound wave at some other place using a linear function - meaning that there is no distortion. Non-linear is when the physics of the medium starts screwing with that function.

[JadeNB]

I believe that it means that the superposition principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposition_principle) doesn't hold: the net response at a point is not just the weighted sum of the individual responses.

[cop359]

so without very high power sounds and the nonlinearity business the whole "Sound from Ultrasound" wouldn't work? Huh, I guess all this time I misunderstood it.

for those curious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound