The Science of Sound

Author's note: This piece is a writing piece showing all  of the  information I wasn't able to express in my video about sound in music and is also a rap up of my project. In this piece I focused on organization and having a better sentence length average.

The gentle hum of a computer, the loud honk of a car horn and the ringing of a phone are all examples of sounds heard in a typical day. However, the scientific reasoning behind how sound is made is a complex concept to grasp. To have an understanding of the concepts of sound is a very difficult task, especially because experimenting is difficult due to the fact that sound isn't visible. Knowing how elements such as refraction, diffraction and ultrasonic technology affect the world is knowledge that is important to have.

Sound is created by the vibrations of different objects such as a guitar string or a drum head. These vibrations then vibrate the air around it, sending sound waves which disturb matter or space, carrying just enough energy to produce a sound, yet not bring matter along with it. Each and every one of these vibrations has a different frequency. Frequency is measured in the unit hertz which expresses the number of times something vibrates in one second, so that a string vibrating five times in one second will have a rate of five hertz.

When a sound wave is interrupted by an object such as a wooden door, the sound must bend around to get to any point beyond the door. This motion is referred to as diffraction. Since there is little space for sound to escape, most of the sound is muted. However, some sound does make it through the door, but this only works for frequencies that have wide enough waves to not get scattered by the particles in the wood. This is why, when listening to music from a separate room, the bass line seems to be the more dominant sound. Because the density of solids and liquids is higher than in gas, sound waves travel faster in these mediums. When a sound wave changes mediums, the speed in which it's traveling is changed. This process is referred to as refraction.

Like dynamics in music, decibels are the measurement in which the volume of a sound is measured. A normal conversation would be marked at roughly twenty decibels, a phone ringing at seventy and an electric guitar at approximately ninety decibels. This scale helps scientists communicate more accurately about volume levels in theories that they may have. One of the many painfully loud sounds on the decibel scale is the sonic boom, which is the explosion sound heard when something, or someone, breaks the sound barrier. The sonic boom is the sound created when someone travels faster than the speed of sound, which is 740 miles per hour.

The human ear is only capable of hearing within a certain frequency range. This range goes down to roughly twenty hertz and up to approximately twenty thousand hertz. There are several animals and machines that can make noises that are beyond our capability of hearing such as the majority of a dolphin or bats speaking range. When a sound is above our hearing range, it is labeled as an ultrasonic sound and when it is below our hearing range it is labeled as an infrasonic sound. An elephants hearing and speaking range is mostly infrasonic, which means they typically communicate with sounds that we are unable to hear without technology. This ability helps elephants sense threatening predators nearby and communicate without being heard by other species.

Music is typically the most common sound that people think of, but the squeak of a shoe hitting the gym floor, or the sound of fingers hitting a keyboard are sounds too. Silence isn't just people not talking, but having everyone and everything completely still. Sound is constantly making its appearance, although it's maybe just too high, too low, or too normal to hear.