Introducing Sound

Have you ever thought about how amazing your sense of hearing is? It is actually pretty remarkable that we can hear the huge range of sounds and determine direction so quickly. How does something actually make a sound that you can hear? Anything that generates a disturbance in the air creates a pulse that travels away from the place where is was created. If this pulse enters your ear it can cause your ear drum to vibrate which is how you hear. If the source of the pulse creates a train of pulses then the disturbance is a wave.

We generally say that sound is a wave. Sound waves are longitudinal, pressure waves, that means that the waves consists of compressions and rarefactions of the pressure of the air.