How does sound travel through matter?
148603
My sons say vibrations
356195
You might find a more accurate answer in an acoustic book, but basically works the same as a speaker, it has some inductors around a magnet that makes a membrane move rapidly making some pressure in the air making the sound.
960213
Sound is a type of longitudinal, mechanical wave. They need a medium to propagate and will not travel through a vacuum. Sound travels at different speed in different media. The speed of sound is determined by the density (ρ) and compressibility (β) of the medium. Density is the amount of material in a given volume, and compressibility is a meaasure of how much a substance could be compacted for a given pressure. The denser and the more compressible, the faster the sound waves would travel. Therefore, the speed of sound is about four times faster in water than in air. The speed of sound in a medium can be determined by the equation  …\n\nv = (βρ)-1/2\n\nWhere …\n\nv is the speed of sound,\nβ is the bulk modulus of elasticity, and\nρ (rho) is the density.\n\nThe speed of sound can also be affected by temperature. Sound waves tend to travel faster at higher temperatures. I have found different values for the speed of sound in water in different sources. They range from 1450 to 1498 meters per second in distilled water and 1531 m/s in sea water at room temperatures (20 to 25 °C).
311007
YES\n\nSince sound waves are mechanical waves they are influenced by the medium in which they travel. But electromagnetic waves such as light and radio waves remain unafftected.
539308
The vibration of a particle at one place is transmitted to the adjacent particle.\n \nThe transmission of vibration energy from one point to another is sound transmission. \n\nThe transmission is not instantaneous. There is a time delay.\n\nThe delayed transmission of energy from one point to another makes the sound to travel with a particular speed. \n\nWhat makes this delay? That is your question. \n\nEvery body is elastic to one or another degree.\n\nLet a body be distorted by a force for a short duration. The body restores itself to its original form. Every body has this elastic property.\n\n This property is the reason that any   mechanical action is transmitted with a finite velocity.\n\nImagine a perfectly rigid rod. This rod by definition cannot be deformed.\n\nAn action of a force on such a rod would be able to move the rod as a unit and the energy will dissipate instantaneously.\n\nTherefore a perfectly rigid body cannot transmit sound. (Velocity of sound is zero)\n\nNext consider a perfectly plastic body.  This body by definition will not return to its original form after distortion.\n\nTherefore a perfectly plastic body also cannot transmit sound. (Velocity of sound is zero)\n\nThus the speed of sound depends upon the elastic property of the materials used.\n\nThe air is highly compressible and takes some time to return to its original form when compared to liquid which are not so compressible and take lesser time to return to original form.\n\nTherefore sound travels with less speed in air than in liquid.\n\nThe density of the substance also plays an important role; If the mass is greater the restoring force gives less acceleration to the particle.
278787
in waves, therefore, in order to be transmitted it requires some medium to transmit the waves in. That's why sound can't travel through a vacuum such as outer space, for example
953747
sounds are waves, which travel through a medium.  In this case, the medium is air.  \n\nVariations in density distort the waves (which is why things sound different underwater).  Wind causes these density fluccuations in air.  Therefore, it can affect the sound you hear.
394921
Sound does not travel in a vacuum.
861424
First, we must remember that sound is transmitted in the form of compression waves, or "longitudinal waves". In other words, the mechanism is through atoms or molecules (I will use the generic term "particles") bump into each other to transfer the energy. So, basically we have a series of elastic collisions where each particle bumps into the next, thereby transferring all of its energy.\n\nNow, the amount of energy being transferred is not dependent upon the frequency, but rather the amplitude of the sound wave. \n\nOn the other hand, the amount of POWER (energy per second) is related to frequency. The higher the frequency, the more often the particles bump into each other, so the more power is delivered.\n\nThe answer to your second question is that our skin cannot "feel" frequencies much above 100 cycles per second, probably less than that, due to its elasticity, it cannot resonate at higher frequencies. On the other hand, our eardrum is designed to vibrate at much higher frequencies, and in effect our ability to hear is a manifestation of our eardrum "feeling" the sound. Of course the eardrum itself is only a very small part of the process by which we hear sounds.\n\nHope this helps.
871688
Sound travels faster than light. Many people believe the opposite is true, citing as evidence the fact that there is a delay between when you see something far away and when you hear the sound it produces (fireworks, someone hitting a baseball, etc.). Though the sound reaches your ears before the light reaches your eyes, it takes your brain longer to process aural input, while it can process visual input almost instantaneously.
61353
NO IT DOES NOT MAKE A SOUND!\n\nto have a sound you need 3 things\n\na source to produce sound waves in a medium\n\na medium for the sound waves to pass through\n\nand a reciever to detect the sound waves\n\n\ntherefor if you have noe reciever to recieve the sound waves there is no sound.\n\nand MR Um?  i'm sorry but trees do not act as a RECIEVER for sound they in this case would act merely as an attenuation ow the sound due to reflection, scattering, and absorbtion.\n\nYOU DO NOT WANT TO ARGUE WITH AN ACOUSTIC ENGINEER WHEN IT COMES TO TALKING ABOUT SOUND!
441980
Sound is made up of compression waves propagated through air when these waves hit your ear they are what we call sound.  when they come in contact with a surface, depending on the makeup of the surface, energy can be absorbed or resonated or both.  If the energy resonates the material and no loss/absorption occurs then the sound will be the same on both sides of the surface (think of a membrane wrapped tightly over an opening like a drum, or ear drum for that matter which has little absorption qualities).  Because a naked/unmodified ceiling is rigid, it has resonant properties and the sound will permeate through the ceiling with some loss. Different surfaces have different amounts of loss/absorption, and some surfaces have excellent absorption qualities, such as off the shelf acoustical tiles, usually hung on a suspended ceiling (mostly because these materials have poor structural qualities and cant be built into the floor).  \nWhen in place the majority of sound energy is absorbed in these tiles and very little is resonated through them, thus sound insulation is achieved.  \nOne thing that needs to be pointed out is that ears are extremely sensitive over a wide range of sound powers, so much so that sound reduction is usually measured in decibels which is powers of 10. The interesting thing is that in the moderate sound power situations the brain has a hard time telling the difference between 10's of decibels, unless there is a point of reference.  And what is meant by this is suppose you are playing the drums in your basement and someone upstairs complains,  you add a false ceiling with some accoustic tiles and continue to play, and still you get complaints you may have lowered the sound that your neigbor recieves by many tens of decibels, but yet their brain still picks out the drums from their quiet environment.  At this point the solution is to go out and buy them something that makes noise, like a hepa-filter or fan, and give it to your neighbor and some how convince them that having it on all the times extends thier life.  Now and only now will the neighbor stop complaining about the noise.
228994
NO!  Sound waves are just vibrations until an ear receives it and sends it to a brain that processes it. If no ear receives it before the vibration dissipates then there is no sound.
941985
Sound is a disturbance of mechanical energy that propagates through matter as a wave. Sound is characterized by the properties of sound waves, which are frequency, wavelength, period, amplitude and velocity or speed.\n\nBy sound, we commonly mean the vibrations that travel through air and can be heard by humans. However, scientists and engineers use a wider definition of sound that includes low and high frequency vibrations in air that cannot be heard by humans, and vibrations that travel through all forms of matter, gases, liquids and solids. The matter that supports the sound is called the medium. Sound propagates as waves of alternating pressure, causing local regions of compression and rarefaction. Particles in the medium are displaced by the wave and oscillate. The scientific study of sound is called acoustics.\n\nNoise and sound often mean the same thing; but noise is often used to refer to an unwanted sound. In science and engineering, noise is an undesirable component that obscures a signal\n\nSound is perceived through the sense of hearing. Humans and many animals use their ears to hear sound, but loud sounds and low-frequency sounds can be perceived by other parts of the body through the sense of touch. Sounds are used in several ways, notably for communication through speech or, for example, music. Sound can also be used to acquire information about properties of the surrounding environment such as spatial characteristics and presence of other animals or objects. For example, bats use echolocation, ships and submarines use sonar, and humans can determine spatial information by the way in which they perceive sounds.\n\nThe speed at which sound travels depends on the medium through which the waves are passing, and is often quoted as a fundamental property of the material. In general, the speed of sound is proportional to the square root of the ratio of the stiffness of the medium and its density. Those physical properties and the speed of sound change with ambient conditions. For example, the speed of sound in air and other gases depends on temperature. In air, the speed of sound is approximately 345 ms-1, in water 1500 ms-1 and in a bar of steel 5000 ms-1.
361250
Well, the ear is naturally designed to collect, focus, and transmit sounds through a tiny and efficient conveyance system called the auditory pathway.\n\nsee how it works\nhttp://www.fi.edu/fellows/fellow2/apr99/auditorypath.html
395975
The most difficult part of understanding things that happen at the microscopic and nanoscopic scale is that a lot of the rules that apply in our everyday lives simply don't work with elementary particles.  If you try to visualize these things, you'll probably end up with some wrong conclusions.\n\nThat said, light waves are fundamentally different from any other wave, such as water, sound, etc., because they do not travel through a medium.  A sound wave travels through air molecules, a water wave travels through water, but a light wave doesn't travel through anything.  To make matters even more confusing, light also has particle-like properties, yet it has no mass and no molecular weight.  A light particle, or photon, is considered an elementary particle, like an electron, proton, or neutron, so it has no molecular make-up, either.\n\nWaves that travel through a medium also do not have a molecular make-up.  Think of a Slinky, for instance.  If you shake one end of the Slinky, a wave travels through the Slinky to the other end, but there's no molecule form for that wave.  The wave basically just energy traveling down a line.  One molecule pushes another molecule pushes another molecule and so on and so on.
386222
sound is particles vibrating in succesion. waves. \nthere are more particles in iron so the sound is trasnfered faster.