Exploring the Nature of Sound and Vibrations

[Graeme M]

I know there is a previous post here about this, but it didn't seem to cover the angle I am getting at...

I understand sound to be vibrations that travel through a medium such as air or water. However, what actually generates these vibrations? For example, hitting a piece of steel with a rod. Vibrations (sound waves) will be generated that travel through the air to my ear. If I do this in space, no sound waves will travel to my ear, however the initial act remains the same.

Put another way, is a sound produced in a vacuum, but just not propogated?

I assume without any basis for doing so that sound waves must have some sort of energy component. Where does that go if there is no medium to dissipate it??

And what is it that actually generates the sound waves? What happens physically as the rod meets the iron?

 

[DaveC426913]

Sound is produced in your ear.

A vibrating source may or may not be adjacent to a medium through which the vibrations are transferred.

Put another way, is a sound produced in a vacuum, but just not propogated?

It is propagated through any matter in contact with the steel. If you went ten yards down to the end of the steel beam and put your head against the steel you would hear sound.

I assume without any basis for doing so that sound waves must have some sort of energy component. Where does that go if there is no medium to dissipate it??

It simply stays in the steel and heats it up. This is why, in some cases, overheating is actially a problem in space. There is no convection or conduction to remove heat - only radiation.

 

[Chestermiller]

Sound in the air consists of a train of alternating closely spaced zones of high and low air pressure that travel from the source to your ear. These alternating high and low pressures cause your ear drum to vibrate back and forth. The signal from your ear drum is transmitted by nerves to your brain, which interprets them as sound. When you strike a bar, the bar starts to vibrate, and causes the air immediately adjacent to the bar to move back and forth, generating the alternating zones of high and low air pressure. In a vacuum, without the air to alternately compress and expand to form the train of alternating zones of high and low pressure, there is no such thing as sound.

Chet

 

[Graeme M]

Thanks for these comments. The ear part I understand - that is the mechanism for us to hear a sound. But a sound exists regardless of whether we hear it. What I am more getting at is what Chestermiller said about the pressure waves. I'm not sure I am quite describing my question well enough!

Take a sudden sharp sound, say the crack from a clap of the hands or the collision of two solid objects. From what you say, even though I hear it as a single sharp sound, it is still composed of a series of pressure waves just of very high frequency traveling through a medium.

What causes the pressure waves though? Is there a physical description of the mechanics of generating those waves? If hands are clapped in space, the mechanism for creating the pressure waves must still be present, mustn't it? But no pressure waves are created. So if the mechanism is independent of the medium, is there a physical description of that mechanism? Or is this just a dumb or poorly framed question?

Dave notes that the energy otherwise lost in producing sound remains in the object in space. Does that mean that a sound system speaker on the moon would heat up just from reproducing sound that can't be heard?

 

[Chestermiller]

As I said in my original post, the pressure waves are generated mechanically in the adjacent air by small scale vibrations of the body that causes the sound. It is also generated mechanically by the sudden large compression caused by your hands compressing air. This short burst of pressure variations travels through the air at the speed of sound to your ear. In the case of the collision of two large objects, the deforming objects mechanically generate both small scale and large scale expansions and compressions of the adjacent air. If you have a loud speaker, the speaker membrane vibrates back and forth and mechanically disturbs the adjacent air in the form of pressure waves.

 

[davenn]

So if the mechanism is independent of the medium, is there a physical description of that mechanism?

Chestermiller covered it in his 2 posts ... but just in case its a mechanical vibration

Dave

 

[Drakkith]

If hands are clapped in space, the mechanism for creating the pressure waves must still be present, mustn't it? But no pressure waves are created. So if the mechanism is independent of the medium, is there a physical description of that mechanism? Or is this just a dumb or poorly framed question?

The 'mechanism' is your hands disturbing the air, so no, it doesn't exist in space. You can't have pressure waves in a medium of air if you aren't in that medium.

 

[sophiecentaur]

Does that mean that a sound system speaker on the moon would heat up just from reproducing sound that can't be heard?

If you supply an audio signal to the voice coil then it will vibrate more than it would in air. As there is less work done on the air, you could find that the amplifier is actually supplying less power. This sort of thing will also happen when you block the input to a fan and it races because it is not doing work on shifting the air. It ain't a simple question to answer.
The coil may well get hotter without any air around to transfer the heat away.

 

[Graeme M]

Thanks for these further clarifications. So sound is pressure waves propagated through a medium. I'm not sure I can quite visualise what 'pressure waves' are but that's OK, the idea is clear enough. If I clap my hands, the impact of hand on hand generates these pressure waves. If I strike a bar of steel in space, the pressure waves will travel through the steel but will not travel beyond that because there is no air.

So 'sound' depends on a medium to carry the vibrations, and the pressure waves are energetic. So in a vacuum, it is as DaveC says above, the energy otherwise used to vibrate the air molecules has to be absorbed within the object and radiated off as heat? Any object generating sound in our atmosphere (eg a struck tuning fork) cannot bleed off energy as sound waves if in space, so it must heat up?

 

[sophiecentaur]

I'm not sure I can quite visualise what 'pressure waves' are

Have you ever played with a slinky spring? You can launch longitudinal waves along the spring and you can see the compressions travel along it. In the case of sound, the situation is very much the same.
You seem to have the right idea about what happens to the energy. Most vibrators will vibrate for much longer in a vacuum because energy is being dissipated at a slower rate.

 

[jtbell]

If I clap my hands, the impact of hand on hand generates these pressure waves.

No, the effect of your hands on the surrounding air molecules generates the pressure waves. Crudely speaking, as your hands come together, they quickly squeeze the air between them. As the air rushes out of the space that that your hands are now filling, it disturbs the air surrounding your hand and triggers a brief burst of pressure waves.

If you clap your hands in vacuum, there is no air to squeeze out.

Your reasoning would apply better to something like a bell or a tuning fork. You strike it and set it vibrating. The vibrations continue in the object for some time after the striking, but you can hear them only if there is air or some other medium between the object and you.

 

[akshaya]

When the rods meet each other, the kinetic energies of the rods (due to its motion) have to become another form of energy due to the law conservation of energy.

If this phenomenon takes place in a medium, this energy transforms into sounds waves and a little bit of heat due to the collision of the rods. As you know, sound waves are vibrations that need a medium to propagate. Since in this context there is a medium, we can hear the sound waves when it hits our eardrum.

Now if this took place in vacuum, the kinetic energies of the rods will still be transformed into sound and heat. The only difference this time is, you'll not be able to hear it because vacuum is not a medium.

Nevertheless, there is a conservation of energy :) Hope this cleared your doubt. If not, please do ask :)

 

[Chestermiller]

Now if this took place in vacuum, the kinetic energies of the rods will still be transformed into sound and heat.

It's not sound in the sense that the OP understands sound. I think you meant to say "vibrations in the rods" rather than "sound."

Chet

 

[akshaya]

It's not sound in the sense that the OP understands sound. I think you meant to say "vibrations in the rods" rather than "sound."

Chet

Oh yes, thankyou for the correction :)

 

[phinds]

... a sound exists regardless of whether we hear it.

I think of it as more than a semantic quibble to say, no, a VIBRATION exists regardless of whether or not a human is around to interpret it as sound. "Sound" is what we feel from our ear drums.

I realize that one talks of "sound waves" as existing regardless of observation, so maybe I'm just back to the tree falling in the forest --- it just depends on your definition of sound.

EDIT: this was just an expansion of Chester's post #13

 

[sophiecentaur]

I'm not sure the word "sound" has the same exclusively psychological connotations that "colour" and "music" have.

 

[akshaya]

I'm not sure the word "sound" has the same exclusively psychological connotations that "colour" and "music" have.

Just as eyes are sensitive to light, the ear is sensitive to the "vibrations" in the medium. These vibrations are sensed by the eardrum, and we perceive it as sound. So, colour and sound are all our perception. On the other hand, vibrations and wavelengths are not.

 

[Khashishi]

Materials are somewhat elastic. When you create a motion in some medium, there is a restoring force. This causes the material to bounce back and oscillate as a wave. The frequency of the wave depends on the restoring force and the mass density (more dense substances take more force to move, but often also have higher restoring forces). Since there is a frequency dependence to the restoring motion, the wave propagates in space. That is sound. It can't travel in a total vacuum, but it can travel through a solid that is surrounded by vacuum.

 

[Graeme M]

Thanks, I think it is clear now. I did understand that sound only propagates in a medium. My question, poorly framed as it was, sought to firstly identify how sound waves are generated in the first place (explained as pressure waves) and secondly what happens in a vacuum to the energy that would otherwise be lost in generating the sound waves in an atmosphere (explained as heat and also through taking longer to stop vibrating).

 

[sophiecentaur]

Just as eyes are sensitive to light, the ear is sensitive to the "vibrations" in the medium. These vibrations are sensed by the eardrum, and we perceive it as sound. So, colour and sound are all our perception. On the other hand, vibrations and wavelengths are not.

We are having a diversion here, about semantics. Sound is vibration with a certain range of frequencies, detected by human ears. That's a fairly generally used definition and it is along the same lines as the definition of light. Otoh, colour is what our eyes make (subjectively) of various combinations of wavelengths of light. Music is, likewise, how our brains / ears assess various combinations of sequences of sound frequencies. To my mind, the two pairs of terms differ, significantly. We, or anyone who is bothered enough about it, should really be discussing this elsewhere, I think.

 

[Graeme M]

I felt the urge to come back to this one. Throughout this thread, the act of hearing was usually implicit in most of the replies, however my interest was not directly in the act of hearing, it was more about the mechanics of producing "sound". There were a few aspects to the question not answered but generally speaking I think I got what was intended.

But I have run into a problem working out the hearing part. And I am sorely in need of explanation of part of the hearing process. I googled a few websites but most just skate over the part I am curious about.

My general understanding of the hearing mechanism is that sound is transmitted via the air as minute pressure waves which strike the eardrum. This causes the membrane to vibrate which in turn vibrates the ossicles. At the end of the ossicles, the final bone in the series - the stapes - vibrates the oval window membrane of the cochlear which again causes motions (pressure waves) in the fluid therein. This causes the basilar membrane to vibrate at tuned frequencies (ie different locations) and stimulate the hairs. So far so good.

However I come back to the stapes. How can so much information be encoded in the simple vibration of a bone? Intuitively all I see is the bone vibrating faster or slower or with greater or lesser intensity. It's a 2-dimensional response that somehow induces a 3-dimensional response in the fluid cavity. The stapes activates the membrane at a particular rate with a particular intensity - I don't see the difference between that and a tuning fork. How does that simple motion encode for all the sounds of a complete orchestra?

I don't mean how the brain and nervous system does it, that much is clear if complex. I mean, how does the simple vibration of a bone give rise to a complex mixture of sounds? The generation of the sound of an orchestra is a complex series of mechanical acts (eg shortening/lengthening strings on frets, changing tuned lengths of hollow tubes, changing tension on a variety of surfaces) that each instrument must undertake to generate pressure waves. And yet this can be ALL pretty faithfully replicated by the singular vibration of an inert bone.

I know it happens, I can experience that every day, but I'm damned if I can see how that works!

 

[Drakkith]

However I come back to the stapes. How can so much information be encoded in the simple vibration of a bone?

The same way that it is encoded into the simple vibration of the air molecules. A non-pure tone is the result of a mix of waves of different frequencies. These waves add together to form a complex waveform which is what your eardrum receives and transmits to the bones and other organs within the ear. The inner ear then decomposes the waveform into the different frequencies the waveform is composed of.

The basic idea of how different frequencies add up to form this waveform is described by a Fourier series. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series

 

[Chestermiller]

I mean, how does the simple vibration of a bone give rise to a complex mixture of sounds?

It is not a simple vibration. The vibration of the bone consists of a superposition of the entire spectrum of intensities and frequencies that each and every instrument in the orchestra produces. The signal is very complicated.

Chet

 

[sophiecentaur]

which in turn vibrates the ossicles

The ossicles act like a Transformer (yes, as in electricity, but mechanical transformation). They are a set of levers which change the relatively small force and relatively large displacement of the very lightweight ear drum diaphragm, due to air vibrations, to a larger force and smaller displacement, to couple the vibrational energy (all frequencies of course) into the fluid of the inner ear. This process is called Matching. The 'design' of the arrangement produces a wide band matching network, which works over the multiple octaves of our hearing. One of the really clever aspects of the mechanism is that there are two 'windows' into the inner ear, which have the effect of balancing out (cancelling) all the noises and vibrations that go on in our heads and only transmit the vibrations of the ear drum to the cochlea. When the second window gets clogged ( colds / ear infection etc) we hear all those sounds as low frequency muffled because they haven't been balanced out between the two windows. Dead clever and millions of years before the arrival of the Differential Op Amp!

As to what is 'sound' and how we perceive it - that's more a matter of philosophy. We're in the same ball park as Colour Vision, with a load of misconceptions and fanciful notions.

 

[Graeme M]

Thanks for the explanations. I dimly follow - I think. I have absolutely no familiarity with acoustics or with the notion of a Fourier transform. I see what you are saying about all of the various waves (vibrations) combining into a single waveform but I cannot picture what that actually means in practice or how the ear mechanism might decompose the waveform (although I read a tutorial that explains the process in terms of the membranes vibrating and the hairs exciting the neurons etc). It's just that my mental image is of a series of varying pulses and I can't see how there can be enough of them from a single source to regenerate the many original sources. I guess this is one I can't properly understand without a lot more learning. But I follow the general principles so thanks.

I assume there is a mechanical limit imposed by the physical speed at which the eardrum can vibrate?

 

[sophiecentaur]

I assume there is a mechanical limit imposed by the physical speed at which the eardrum can vibrate?

Right idea but it's not so much the speed as the rate (frequency) it can vibrate. Microphones and loudspeakers have the same frequency limitation, due to the finite mass of the vibrating bit and the limit to the amount of power available at any given frequency. The other moving components will also have a frequency limit. The joints between the ossicles can get gummed up and restrict your HF reception. (And. of course, there is the dreaded was in the outer ear.)

 

[DaveC426913]

wax

 

[russ_watters]

I see what you are saying about all of the various waves (vibrations) combining into a single waveform but I cannot picture what that actually means in practice or how the ear mechanism might decompose the waveform (although I read a tutorial that explains the process in terms of the membranes vibrating and the hairs exciting the neurons etc).

Superposition describes how all of the waveforms that are generated separately get combined into one. But once combined, they don't necessarily need to be separated again. A record, for example, can have a single groove and a single pickup that is a single piece of metal vibrating like the bones in your ear.

 

[sophiecentaur]

wax

Wax was in there?

 

[DaveC426913]

Wax was in there?

I was correcting what I think was a typo:

The joints between the ossicles can get gummed up and restrict your HF reception. (And. of course, there is the dreaded was in the outer ear.)

 

[sophiecentaur]

I was correcting what I think was a typo:

I know. I wax hoping it wax a joke.

 

[William White]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02yq1b9

(these are beautiful - wonderful illustrations; the artist deserves a medal)