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Waves are disturbances in space which transfer some form of energy. They are found throughout our world in many varieties and are often mathematically modeled using sinusoidal functions. The two major types of waves are mechanical and electromagnetic. Mechanical waves necessarily travel through some medium. The nature of this medium can vary depending on the wave. Electromagnetic waves do not require a medium to travel and so are able to travel through a vacuum. Waves, depending on their type, have certain properties that can be measured and modeled. These properties include velocity, frequency, period, wavelength, amplitude and phase. Because sound is something most humans are very familiar with, we are going to use sound waves to explore the idea of modeling waves with sinusoidal functions, and consequently, recognize some of the properties of the sine function.
A typical sinusoidal function looks something like this: y = sin where is some angle 1 (1)
The period of the graph (one peak to another) is 360 or 2 in radians. The amplitude is 1 and the frequency is the inverse of the period.
To reduce the complexity of sound waves, which are moving through both space and time, we are going to look at a snapshot of a sound waves all with an arbitrary amplitude of one. This means we are going to examine how sound waves might look if frozen in time, but stretched out across space. First we are going to see how a sinusoidal function modeling a sound wave might look: y = A sin (2f /v) y = A sin (2/) (2) (3)
where: - A is the amplitude, which can be interpreted as volume or loudness (described as loudness not because I expect volume to not be understood, but 2
because in the world of physics, volume often takes on a dierent meaning). -f is the frequency, which means number of oscillations per second -v is the velocity of the wave, which for sound depends on the medium it travels through. An accepted value for the speed of sound through air is 345m/s - is the wavelength Using this function to model a sound wave results in a time independent image of a wave where the wavelength appears as the period when plotted. We can understand the relationship between the speed of a wave, the frequency and the wavelength: v = f (4)
Now, lets talk music. Sound waves have a pitch, as we all know, and this pitch is dened by its frequency. An important aspect of music is chords, which is two or more notes being played at the same time. This results in sound waves with dierent frequencies and therefore dierent wavelengths overlapping. We can hear these waves overlapping in music, but what would this look like? Musicians understand the relationship between sound waves with their ears, by modeling these waves, we can examine this relationship with our eyes.
Note: The amplitude is set to one, the x axis has been scaled in centimetres
Major Triad:5/4
The following image shows two very close frequency waves (diering by 7 Hz) actually added together, showing the how the amplitude of the two waves changes over the time, producing the slight oscillations in volume one experiences while trying to match pitches: