Artists have found ways to depict sounds (1), but how can quantitative aspects of sounds be represented visually? Sounds audible to humans are produced by objects vibrating at frequencies between about 20 Hz and 20 kHz. Molecules in the surrounding medium (gas, liquid or solid) are disturbed by the vibration, and the disturbance travels as a longitudinal wave (2). For an animation: see: www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/demos/waves/wavemotion.html
A travelling sound wave can be represented by four different graphs (3). The higher the frequency of vibration, the higher the pitch of the sound that we hear (4); the greater the amplitude, the louder the sound.
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