Sound Waves Essay

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Music, one of the most beautiful sounds on Earth, the strumming of a guitar, the vibrations of reeds in a saxophone, the vibration and the pressure in between the two heads of the drums, the vibration of the bass chords. Every single thing has its own sound, some of those can not be heard because of the low or the high amount of hertz, and can only be heard by another type of animal that can actually hear that amount of frequency for example whales can hear a very high frequency while dogs can too. Us humans can hear only a certain amount of hertz. But what is sound? How does our ears receive the message that they have to be at work, receiving and transmitting frequencies so the people can listen the beautiful sound of music, or even the terrible sound of a car crashing, but what is a sound wave? And how do sound waves work?
A wave can be defined as a disturbance that travels through a medium, which carries energy. Medium is just the material in which the wave causes disturbance. On earth most of the mediums are, oxygen and water. “The basis for an understanding of sound, music and hearing is the physics of waves. Sound is a wave that is created by vibrating objects and propagated through a medium from one location to another.”(1)The most common objects used by teachers and people explaining sound waves are a tuning fork, and a slinky. A tuning fork because of the vibrations, that can be seen, and heard by tapping the tuning fork into another harder object. Slinkys are simply used, because it gives a great visual illustration of how a wave works. Since a sound waves cause disturbance through the medium they’re traveling through, a sound wave is characterized as a mechanical wave.
As the sound waves travels through air, the...

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...where one can mostly hear the vibration and path of sound waves, are woodwinds, like saxophone, clarinets, and accordions. These instruments are made with wood reeds, in which every time that air goes against the reed, the reed starts vibrating causing a sound.
Sound waves are everywhere. A very big thanks to the ears, thanks for to the ears for receiving the vibrations that are caused by objects, which travel through material to get to the ears, which will send a message to the brains about the vibrations and how to read them. Sounds are just a form of vibrations. Those vibrations cause many feelings, many emotions, many changes in attitude. Its funny to find out that a beautiful song, is only a mixture of many vibrations making paths through the medium, with different type of pitches and force, that our ears are receiving and transmitting into a beautiful song.

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