Sound’s story. 2) What is sound… the mechanics?
Sound is a wave movement that we can hear. It has to travel through a medium. And it has to create resonance in a receiver (e.g. your ear) in order to be ‘heard’. Three of the most commonly known mediums that I wish to refer to in this paper are air, water, and earth. Those three mediums are made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms. Within a given medium the density of that medium is influenced by its own mass, temperature, and pressure. The density and temperature affect the speed at which sound can travel through it. In the air, sound travels at approximately 1100 ft/second, in water it travels at approximately 5,000ft/second, and in the earth at approximately 8,000 ft/second. The number of times a wave passes a certain point per second is its frequency, which is measured in Hertz (Hz). Frequency is commonly referred to as ‘pitch’, i.e. the actual sound that we hear (e.g. the musical note ‘a’ or ‘c#’). The distance between each wave motion is its wavelength; it is a measure of the distance between each pulsing compression of molecules within a given medium. The relationship between a sounds’ wavelength and its frequency will give us the speed at which it is traveling, aka its velocity. Longer wavelengths are able to travel further distances than shorter wavelengths. Sound can travel faster through a dense medium than a less dense medium as the energy has less far to travel between the more tightly packed molecules and therefore less of its kinetic energy is lost in the transformation to heat energy.
