You have a job in a biomedical engineering laboratory working on technology to enhance hearing. You have learned that the human ear canal is essentially an air filled tube approximately 2.7 cm long that is open on one end and closed on the other. You wonder if there is a connection between hearing sensitivity and the standing waves that can exist in the ear canal. To test your idea, you calculate the lowest three frequencies of the standing waves in the ear canal. From your Physics textbook, you find that the speed of sound in air is 343 m/s
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.
You have a job in a biomedical engineering laboratory working on technology to enhance
hearing. You have learned that the human ear canal is essentially an air filled tube
approximately 2.7 cm long that is open on one end and closed on the other. You wonder
if there is a connection between hearing sensitivity and the standing waves that can
exist in the ear canal. To test your idea, you calculate the lowest three frequencies of the
standing waves in the ear canal. From your Physics textbook, you find that the speed
of sound in air is 343 m/s.
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