  With an enlighting analysis, Baskaran and Grishchuk have recently shown the
presence and importance of the so-called ``magnetic'' components of
gravitational waves (GWs), which have to be taken into account in the context
of the total response functions of interferometers for GWs propagating from
arbitrary directions. In this paper more detailed angular and frequency
dependences of the response functions for the magnetic components are given in
the approximation of wavelength much larger than the linear dimensions of the
interferometer, with a specific application to the parameters of the LIGO and
Virgo interferometers. Our results agree with the work of Baskaran and
Grishchuk in which it has been shown that the identification of ``electric''
and ``magnetic'' contributions is unambiguous in the long-wavelength
approximation. At the end of this paper the angular and frequency dependences
of the total response functions of the LIGO and Virgo interferometers are
given. In the high-frequency regime the division on ``electric'' and
``magnetic'' components becomes ambiguous, thus the full theory of
gravitational waves has to be used. Our results are consistent with the ones of
Baskaran and Grishchuk in this case too.
