Jeslyn V.

Dumaran Grade 11
Research #1 March 20,
2017

What is sound?

Sound is the energy things produce when they vibrate (move back and forth quickly). If
you bang a drum, you make the tight skin vibrate at very high speed (it's so fast that you can't
usually see it), forcing the air all around it to vibrate as well. As the air moves, it carries energy
out from the drum in all directions. Eventually, even the air inside your ears starts vibrating
and that's when you begin to perceive the vibrating drum as a sound. In short, there are two
different aspects to sound: there's a physical process that produces sound energy to start with
and sends it shooting through the air, and there's a separate psychological process that
happens inside our ears and brains, which convert the incoming sound energy into sensations
we interpret as noises, speech, and music. We're just going to concentrate on the physical
aspects of sound in this article.

Sound is like light in some ways: it travels out from a definite source (such as an
instrument or a noisy machine), just as light travels out from the Sun or a light bulb. But there
are some very important differences between light and sound as well. We know light can travel
through a vacuum because sunlight has to race through the vacuum of space to reach us on
Earth. Sound, however, cannot travel through a vacuum: it always has to have something to
travel through (known as a medium), such as air, water, glass, or metal.

The first person to discover that sound needs a medium was a brilliant English scientist
known as Robert Boyle (16271691). He carried out a classic experiment that you've probably
done yourself in school: he set an alarm clock ringing, placed it inside a large glass jar, and
while the clock was still ringing, sucked all the air out with a pump. As the air gradually
disappeared, the sound died out because there was nothing left in the jar for it to travel
through.

How sound travels

When you hear an alarm clock ringing, you're listening to energy making a journey. It
sets off from somewhere inside the clock, travels through the air, and arrives some time later in
your ears. It's a little bit like waves traveling over the sea: they start out from a place where the
wind is blowing on the water (the original source of the energy, like the bell or buzzer inside
your alarm clock), travel over the ocean surface (that's the medium that allows the waves to
travel), and eventually wash up on the beach (similar to sounds entering your ears). If you want
to learn more about how sea waves travel, read our article on surfing science.

There is one crucially important difference between waves bumping over the sea and the
sound waves that reach our ears. Sea waves travel as up-and-down vibrations: the water moves
up and down (without really moving anywhere) as the energy in the wave travels forward.

Source: http://www.explainthatstuff.com/sound.html
Waves like this are called transverse waves. That just means the water vibrates at right angles
to the direction in which the wave travels. Sound waves work in a completely different way. As a
sound wave moves forward, it makes the air bunch together in some places and spread out in
others. This creates an alternating pattern of squashed-together areas (known
as compressions) and stretched-out areas (known as a rarefactions). In other words, sound
pushes and pulls the air back and forth where water shakes it up and down. Water waves
shake energy over the surface of the sea, while sound waves thump energy through the body of
the air. Sound waves are compression waves. They're also called longitudinal waves because
the air vibrates along the same direction as the wave travels.

To get the difference between transverse and longitudinal waves clear in your mind, take a look
at these two little animations on Wikimedia Commons:

Animation of a transverse wave (how light and water waves travel).

Animation of a longitudinal wave (how sound waves travel).

The science of sound waves

If you've ever got time on your hands while you're lazing on the beach, try watching the
different ways in which waves can behave. You'll notice that waves traveling on water can do all
kinds of clever things, like smashing into a wall and reflecting straight back with more or less
the same intensity. They can also spread out in ripples, creep their way up the beach, and do
other clever stuff. What's happening here with water waves doesn't actually have anything to do
with the water: it's simply the way energy behaves when it's carried along by waves. Similar
things happen with other kinds of waveswith light and with sound too.

You can reflect a sound wave off something the same way light will reflect off a mirror or
water waves will bounce off a sea wall and go back out to sea. Stand some distance from a large
flat wall and clap your hands repeatedly. Almost immediately you'll hear a ghostly repeat of
your clapping, slightly out of step with it. What you hear is, of course, sound reflection, better
known as an echo: it's the sound energy in your clap traveling out to the wall, bouncing back,
and eventually entering your ears. There's a delay between the sound and the echo because it
takes time for the sound to race to the wall and back (the bigger the distance, the longer the
delay).

Sound waves lose energy as they travel. That's why we can only hear things so far and
why sounds travel less well on blustery days (when the wind dissipates their energy) than on
calm ones. Much the same thing happens on the oceans. Crisp water waves can sometimes
travel vast distances across the ocean, but they can also be messed up when squally weather
dissipates their energy over shorter distances.

Source: http://www.explainthatstuff.com/sound.html
 Sound waves are like light and water waves in other ways too. When water waves
traveling long distances across the ocean flow around a headland or into a bay, they spread out
in circles like ripples. Sound waves do exactly the same thing, which is why we can hear
around corners. Imagine you're sitting in a room off a corridor and, much further up the
corridor, there's an identical room where someone is practicing a trumpet inside. Sound waves
travel out from the trumpet, spreading out as they go. They ripple out down the corridor, race
along it, ripple through the doorway into your room and eventually reach your ears. The
tendency waves have to spread out as they travel and bend around corners is
called diffraction.

Source: http://www.explainthatstuff.com/sound.html