Question

If the wave represents a sound wave, explain how increasing amplitude will affect the loudness of the sound? If we decrease the pitch of the sound, what affect will this have on wavelength

Answer 1

Answer:

Explanation:

Think of a sound wave like a wave on the ocean, or lake... It's not really water moving, as much as it's energy moving through the water. Ever see something floating on the water, and notice that it doesn't come in with the wave, but rides over the top and back down into the trough between them? Sound waves are very similar to that. If you looked at a subwoofer speaker being driven at say... 50 cycles a second, you'd actually be able to see the speaker cone moving back and forth. The more power you feed into the speaker, the more it moves back and forth, not more quickly, as that would be a higher frequency, but further in and further out, still at 50 cycles per second. Every time it pushed out, it's compressing the air in front of it... the compressed air moves away from the speaker's cone, but not as a breeze or wind, but as a wave through the air, similar to a wave on the ocean

More power, more amplitude, bigger "wave", louder ( to the human ear) sound.

If you had a big speaker ( subwoofer ) and ran a low frequency signal with enough power in it, you could hold a piece of paper in front of it, and see the piece of paper move in and out at exactly the same frequency as the speaker cone. The farther away from the speaker you got, the less it'd move as the energy of the sound wave dispersed through the room.

Sound is a wave

We hear because our eardrums resonates with this wave I.e. our ear drums will vibrate with the same frequency and amplitude. which is converted to an electrical signal and processed by our brain.

By increasing the amplitude our eardrums also vibrate with a higher amplitude which we experience as a louder sound.

Of course when this amplitude is too high the resulting resonance tears our eardrums so that they can't resonate with the sound wave I.e. we become deaf