Sound Vibrations
Would you know the answer to the question “How does your hearing work”? If not, you should read on. Your ears are amazing organs. Ears gather up all the sounds of life and the world around you and then, like an interpreter, translate these sounds into data that your brain can understand. And did you also know that the process of hearing is completely mechanical?. Unlike your sense of smell, taste and vision that involve chemical reactions, Hearing simply occurs when there’s physical movement.
No matter where you are, whether you live in the noisy city of New York, or the quiet towns of Virgina, like Rochester, Hearing is affected by the mechanical systems of your body. Let’s take a look at the path a sound wave takes. Then we’ll see how all the parts of your ear work together to make your hear what you hear each day. When you read all this information, you’ll see that ears are one of the most incredible parts of your body!
Sound is when an object vibrates in matter. For the most part, we hear sounds traveling through the air in our atmosphere. When this happens, the vibration moves the air particles around it. Then the air particles carry the pulse of the vibration through the air.
For example, when you hit a drum, the drum vibrates and when it flexes out on one side, it pushes on the surrounding air particles on that side. These air particles then collide with the particles in front of them, and so on and so forth. And vise versa, when the drum pulls in, it sucks the surrounding air particles in and creates a drop in pressure.
In this way, the vibrating objects pass the vibrating sound waves into the atmosphere for our ears to pick up. Then we hear the differences in vibrations because of the differences in wave frequency. A higher wave frequency just means that the air pressure fluctuation changes back and forth faster. People hear these sounds as a higher pitches. When there are fewer fluctuations in a period of time, the sounds are of lower pitch. The level of air pressure in each fluctuation, named the wave's amplitude, determines how loud the sound is.
Tags: sound wave, noisy city, hearing, sense of smell, sound waves, ear work, Health, wave frequency