Sound, in fifteen minutes or less.

In the interest of becoming a faster thinker and better writer, I thought I'd try a timed writing exercise. The following is all I have to say about sound in fifteen minutes. (I didn't plan for it to be so science-y, but of course it is.)

Have you ever stopped to think about sound? Acoustics is a fascinating area of study.

Sound is a wave of vibration that travels through matter. It doesn't work in space. But it does move through solids in intriguing ways. 

It's a longitudinal wave. That means the pressure of the vibration is applied parallel to the direction the sound is moving. When you hear a sound, your ear is picking up energy that's been passed from layer to layer of particles between the source and your ear. Think of a series of balls bumping each other across a pool table, but in this case they bounce back.

Any sound wave has the same basic properties. Amplitude is the range of oscillation---how far does the back-and-forth motion extend? We hear this as the volume of the sound. Frequency is how quickly the motion is happening. That defines the pitch we hear, low or high. 

All that is in the time domain. Now, enter the frequency domain, where things get really interesting. Resonance can make things levitate. But that'll have to wait for another post.