 | Hearing is one of our five senses, which makes sound an important part of how we interact with the world.
Sound is a longitudinal wave that travels to our ears as variations in pressure in the air.
Pitch and loudness are commonly used to describe the sounds we hear, and both are related to physical properties of the sound waves themselves.
We can distinguish different voices and musical instruments because the sound produced by each has a different timbre—a unique set of higher frequency overtones that make up the sounds.
In this chapter, you will learn about the basic properties of sound and apply those concepts to understand why an approaching train has a higher pitch than a receding one, why jets produce a supersonic boom, and how a musical instrument works.
|  | | By the end of this chapter you should be able to
|  | describe how sound propagates;
| | describe pitch and loudness for sound and how they relate to amplitude, frequency, and wavelength;
| | solve problems involving frequency, wavelength, and the speed of sound;
| | describe subsonic and supersonic motion;
| | describe the Doppler effect, provide examples, and calculate the frequency shift;
| | describe how sounds can include more than one frequency, interpret spectrograms, and explain how to distinguish different musical instruments;
| | describe echoes and calculate the distance to a reflecting surface; and
| | describe the concepts of reverberation, beats, and resonance in a pipe and provide examples of each.
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|  | 16A: Sound waves
16B: Doppler effect
16C: How sound carries information
16D: Resonance and sound
Design project: Musical instrument
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