What Is Sound?

The existence of sound is dependent on our ears. What this means is that without our ears and their function system, sound as we know it would not exist, it would just be the interaction between air particles caused by pressure. However, the ear takes these sound waves which are the invisible pushes and pulls of the air particles and translates them to sound in our brains. sound needs a medium to travel through because it needs something to transfer the energy from, and that medium is usually air though it can also be solids or liquids.

Sound waves are generally measured across two dimensions, Amplitude and Frequency. Amplitude is the energy/pressure of the air particles or the “loudness”of the sound. However, it is important to remember that loudness is also a matter of perspective.In addition, What sounds loud to you might sound different to someone else. Frequency is the speed of the push and pulls of the air particles or “pitch” of the sound so the faster the air particles move or technically speaking, the more cycles they take per second, the higher will the pitch be.

If you Link the relationship between the human ear and sound waves, you might think to yourself that we should hear everything all at once, but we don’t thus, It doesn’t make any sense. Actually, the human ear is more sensitive to some frequencies than the others. For instance, the frequency in which speech takes place. There is also a limit to what we can hear “threshold of hearing ” and a limit to what we can tolerate listening to before we damage our hearing “Threshold of pain”. (Brian White, 2012)

References :

Figure 1. From the lab: The high and low of sound. March 13, 2016

Lynda.com . (November, 2012) . What Are Frequency And Amplitude. Retrieved from Foundations of Audio: EQ and Filters