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Sound and its properties
How is sound produced and how does it travel through different mediums/materials?
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2 Replies
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Sound is made when something vibrates or shakes. Think of it like wiggling a string on a guitar or clapping your hands. These vibrations create sound waves, which are like invisible ripples that move through the air, water, or even solids.
When something vibrates, like a guitar string or your vocal cords when you talk, it makes the air particles around it move back and forth. These moving particles create sound waves that travel through the air as if they were little squeezes and stretches.
When you hear a sound, like someone speaking or music playing, what you’re actually hearing are those sound waves reaching your ears. They make your eardrums vibrate, and your brain turns those vibrations into the sounds you recognize.
But sound waves don’t just travel through the air. They can also move through other things, like solids and liquids. In solids, like a table or a wall, the vibrations can pass from one particle to another, making the sound travel through the solid material.
In liquids, like water, sound waves move by making the water particles vibrate. So if you splash your hand in water, the vibrations travel through the water, and you can even hear sounds underwater, although they may be different or quieter compared to in the air.
So, to sum it up: sound is created when something vibrates, and those vibrations make air, water, or solids vibrate too. The vibrations turn into sound waves that travel through the air, water, or solid materials, and when they reach our ears, we hear them as sound.
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When we hear something, we are sensing the vibrations in the air. These vibrations enter the outer ear and cause our eardrums to vibrate (or oscillate). Attached to the eardrum are three tiny bones that also vibrate: the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup. These bones make larger vibrations within the inner ear, essentially amplifying the incoming vibrations before they are picked up by the auditory nerve.
The properties of a sound wave change when it travels through different media: gas (e.g. air), liquid (e.g. water) or solid (e.g. bone). When a wave passes through a denser medium, it goes faster than it does through a less-dense medium. This means that sound travels faster through water than through air, and faster through bone than through water.
Speaking (as well as hearing) involves vibrations. To speak, we move air past our vocal cords, which makes them vibrate. We change the sounds we make by stretching those vocal cords. When the vocal cords are stretched we make high sounds and when they are loose we make lower sounds. This is known as the pitch of the sound.
The sounds we hear every day are actually collections of simpler sounds. A musical sound is called a tone. If we strike a tuning fork, it gives off a pure tone, which is the sound of a single frequency. But if we were to sing or play a note on a trumpet or violin, the result is a combination of one main frequency with other tones. This gives each musical instrument its characteristic sound.
You can also check this link to know more about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwtgPNbUOUo
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