The first two replies are heading you in the right direction. If the whole system doesn't work together, it doesn't work.
Some builders have (once upon a time) used a longer intake track to get a more laminar flow, I don't see that much these days.
The reversion that other posters are referring to is entirely real. The most obvious example is on old HD Big Twins, on a fresh motor with a perfect valve job, if you take the air cleaner off, at a certain rpm, usually a fast idle, you will see gasoline mist blowing backwards out of the carburetor. That is reversion.
I have tinkered with track shape and port wall smoothness/roughness, HD figured out in the late 1970s that a little smoothness on the long side of the intake track, and a little roughness on the short side of the intake track, with a little subsequent turbulence in the boundary layer, did actually help flow. The best heads I've used are not too smooth and not too rough in the intake track. I know, real scientific. Valve guide shape seems to matter also.
A given air filter shape, carburetor throat diameter, intake port configuration, valve head configuration, cam lift, duration, and timing, compression ratio, piston dome configuration, exhaust port shape and size, and exhaust pipe size and length, will combine at any given rpm to form the conditions in the intake port that you are concerned with.
It's tricky.
When the slug of exhaust gas hits the end of the pipe it goes from a certain shape, size, density, velocity, to what is for all practical purposes infinity (outside the pipe).
You then get some sort of reversion, depending upon the particular application. And the harmonics that other posters have mentioned.
After years of screwing around with the intake side, I finally realized that the result I was looking for was really in the exhaust. So I pick a cam that I like for the application, do a careful valve job that works for that cam, and then tune the exhaust.
I'm a big fan of anti-reversion cones immediately outside the exhaust port, others may disagree.
Now there is some length of pipe that spoils the harmonic we're concerned with. So for example, after I get everything else squared away, with 1-3/4" pipe (shorter than I would run) I slide a slightly larger pipe over it, just enough for a slip fit, and slide it back and forth like a trombone, at various rpm.
If you feel anything about motors, you will feel the sweet spot where the exhaust is the right length for that rpm. You can't miss it. The whole track, from the air cleaner to the end of the exhaust , just starts working together and you can feel it, hear it, it's palpable.
That's just one small piece of a big puzzle, but it is a way to get to the conditions in the intake track that you're asking about.
It's also the logic behind the slash-cut straight pipes from the 1960's.
Now this is all about old Harleys, but the logic pertains to any motor.