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The speed of sound is the distance travelled per unit of time by a sound wave as it propagates through an elastic medium. More simply, the speed of sound is how fast vibrations travel. More simply, the speed of sound is how fast vibrations travel.
Sound waves that have frequencies below 16 Hz are called infrasonic and those above 20 kHz are called ultrasonic. Sound is a mechanical wave and as such consists physically in oscillatory elastic compression and in oscillatory displacement of a fluid .
Sound propagates as mechanical vibration waves of pressure and displacement, in air or other substances. [5] In general, frequency components of a sound determine its "color", its timbre . When speaking about the frequency (in singular) of a sound, it means the property that most determines its pitch . [ 6 ]
There are many kinds of transduction process that convert energy from some other form into sonic energy, producing a sound wave. There is one fundamental equation that describes sound wave propagation, the acoustic wave equation, but the phenomena that emerge from it are varied and often complex. The wave carries energy throughout the ...
where is the speed of the wave, the fundamental frequency can be found in terms of the speed of the wave and the length of the pipe: f 0 = v 4 L {\displaystyle f_{0}={\frac {v}{4L}}} If the ends of the same pipe are now both closed or both opened, the wavelength of the fundamental harmonic becomes 2 L {\displaystyle 2L} .
The speed of sound depends on the medium the waves pass through, and is a fundamental property of the material. The first significant effort towards measurement of the speed of sound was made by Isaac Newton. He believed the speed of sound in a particular substance was equal to the square root of the pressure acting on it divided by its density:
The speed of sound (i.e., the longitudinal motion of wavefronts) is related to frequency and wavelength of a wave by =.. This is different from the particle velocity , which refers to the motion of molecules in the medium due to the sound, and relates to the plane wave pressure to the fluid density and sound speed by =.
If the wave is a sound wave and the sound source is moving faster than the speed of sound, the resulting shock wave creates a sonic boom. Lord Rayleigh predicted the following effect in his classic book on sound: if the observer were moving from the (stationary) source at twice the speed of sound, a musical piece previously emitted by that ...