Certain species of mice have a threshold of hearing below that of humans. Suppose you're sitting on a grassy knoll relaxing in the sunlight on a beautiful spring day out in the country. The air is still, and it's quiet. A bird is on the grass about two meters behind you and makes a faint rustling sound in the grass, and the sound is just barely at the threshold of your hearing. At the same time, the mouse whose hearing threshold is −3dB is somewhere nearby, and the rustling sound is also at the threshold of its hearing. How far (in meters) is the mouse from the bird? (To check your answer, ask yourself if you expected the mouse to be further from or closer to the bird than you. Why?)
Properties of sound
A sound wave is a mechanical wave (or mechanical vibration) that transit through media such as gas (air), liquid (water), and solid (wood).
Quality Of Sound
A sound or a sound wave is defined as the energy produced due to the vibrations of particles in a medium. When any medium produces a disturbance or vibrations, it causes a movement in the air particles which produces sound waves. Molecules in the air vibrate about a certain average position and create compressions and rarefactions. This is called pitch which is defined as the frequency of sound. The frequency is defined as the number of oscillations in pressure per second.
Categories of Sound Wave
People perceive sound in different ways, like a medico student takes sound as vibration produced by objects reaching the human eardrum. A physicist perceives sound as vibration produced by an object, which produces disturbances in nearby air molecules that travel further. Both of them describe it as vibration generated by an object, the difference is one talks about how it is received and other deals with how it travels and propagates across various mediums.
Certain species of mice have a threshold of hearing below that of humans.
Suppose you're sitting on a grassy knoll relaxing in the sunlight on a beautiful spring day out in the country. The air is still, and it's quiet. A bird is on the grass about two meters behind you and makes a faint rustling sound in the grass, and the sound is just barely at the threshold of your hearing. At the same time, the mouse whose hearing threshold is −3dB is somewhere nearby, and the rustling sound is also at the threshold of its hearing. How far (in meters) is the mouse from the bird?
(To check your answer, ask yourself if you expected the mouse to be further from or closer to the bird than you. Why?)
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