[R] sound library

[giojona@libero.it]

I'm collaborating with and electronic musician to experiment on the production of music from number sequences. As I'm an R user I started playing around with the sound library and I found it very useful. However there are several things I do not understand (I'm not an expert in acustic nor audio signal treatment).

The first thing I'd like to understand is: let s be a normalized sample and suppose it generates a waveform with non audible frequencies. Then if I play it trough the function "play" (I'm using an R-window version) I won't hear anything. Then I play: play(10000*s) and I can hear something. What is happening to the audio sample? 

I saved as wave files both s and 10000*s and then with my musician friend we looked at the waveforms we got.
They are totally different from each other and we couldn't fidure out which transformation of s generated the 10000*s waveform.

Can anyone explain what is going on?

Thanks in advance

Giovanna Jona Lasinio