

The first person to discover that sound needs a medium was a brilliant English scientist known as Photo by Bill Thompson courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service. Whales, famously, "talk" to one another across entire ocean basins, while dolphins use sound, like bats, for echolocation. That's largely why mighty creatures of the deep rely on sound for communication and navigation. Photo: Sensing with sound: Light doesn't travel well through ocean water: over half the light falling on the sea surface is absorbed within the first meter of water 100m down and only 1 percent of the surface light remains.

Sound, however, cannot travel through a vacuum: it always has to have something to travel through (known as a medium), such as air, water, glass, or We know light can travel through a vacuum because sunlight has to race through the vacuum of space to reach us on Earth. But there are some very important differences between light and sound as well. Sound is like light in some ways: it travels out from a definite source (such as an instrument or a noisy machine), just as light travels out from the Sun or a light bulb. We're just going to concentrate on the physical aspects of sound in this article. In short, there are two different aspects to sound: there's a physical process that produces sound energy to start with and sends it shooting through the air, and there's a separate psychological process that happens inside our ears and brains, which convert the incoming sound energy into sensations we interpret as noises, speech, and music. Eventually, even the air inside your ears starts vibrating-and that's when you begin to perceive the vibrating drum as a sound. As the air moves, it carries energy out from the drum in all directions.
Soundwaves found my way skin#
If you bang a drum, you make the tight skin vibrate at very high speed (it's so fast that you can't usually see it), forcing the air all around it to vibrate as well. Sound is the energy things produce when they vibrate
