Question about soundwaves

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famous beagle

famous beagle

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I'm not sure where this question belongs, so I put it here.

I'm wondering if anyone knows this:

Does anyone know approximately how many actual soundwaves are produced from, say .... an acoustic guitar?

I mean, I know that sound spreads in all directions, and that bass frequencies disseminate more than treble frequencies, but does anyone have an idea of the actual number of sound "waves" that are produced? Is it thousands? Millions? I really have no clue.

Anyone?
 
middle A = 144 oscillations per second (i believe its persecond...). think of a sound wave as being a unified 3d bubble of sorts, with refractive properties. essentially, when middle A is played on any instrument, 144 sound bubbles are being shot out of your instrument omnidirectionally per second. To understand why each instrument sounds different, think of the bubble as having a unique texture.

hope that helps.

P.s. treble dessiminates quicker than bass, hence why you can usually hear a bass blasting outside a building, but never the treble. Its just that our ears pick up treble easier, so we tend to think that bass isnt as "pronounced" a wave.
 
Ah... A proper is 440 hz.. But a guitar playing an A will also have harmonics reaching upwards of 15khz... so that's just one note, think of many notes and chords playing in succesion.... Your're definately talking millions or billions of soundwaves.
 
bewildered said:
middle A = 144 oscillations per second (i believe its persecond...). think of a sound wave as being a unified 3d bubble of sorts, with refractive properties. essentially, when middle A is played on any instrument, 144 sound bubbles are being shot out of your instrument omnidirectionally per second. To understand why each instrument sounds different, think of the bubble as having a unique texture.

hope that helps.

P.s. treble dessiminates quicker than bass, hence why you can usually hear a bass blasting outside a building, but never the treble. Its just that our ears pick up treble easier, so we tend to think that bass isnt as "pronounced" a wave.

No .. this didn't really answer my question. I appreciate the reply, but I don't think you understood the question (or maybe I'm not understanding the answer). It sounds as though you're talking about the frequency of the wave, which I understand. (Are you not talking about that?) But frequency is just measuring how many times one wave cycles in one second, and that's not what I'm asking.

And I learned in acoustics class that bass waves disseminate more than treble. This is why if you're standing outside a door, all you hear is bass. But if you put your ear to the floor, you'll hear the treble coming through under the door because it's not spreading out as much. My teacher explained it better, but I thought that was the jist.
 
what exactly are you trying to figure out??
"sound waves" isn't really a term that defines any specific thing. a sound wave is anything that has to do with sound. a pin drop, a bomb exploding. both create waves of sound. and by waves I mean longitudinal pressure of audible or inaudible sound. are you trying to ask how long does a sound wave continue??? As in, when does a sound totally disappear?
 
I think what he's asking (purely out of curiosity I assume, because I can see no practical application from this knowledge?) is if anyone knows how many actual "waves" travel from a given sound source at once. That is, he understands basically what a soundwave is, etc. but he wants to know in all planes (three-dimensionally), how many "waves" are shooting out at once. Like, when you pluck a guitar string, and that one oscillation shoots off, but simultaneously in every direction, meaning 1 individual wave fills its 1 area of sound space (for lack of a better word), and the number he's theoretically seeking would be how many waves are exiting in sum. Same thing applies for, say, a light bulb. The "waves" of light distribute throughout a room, but 1 ray only goes 1 direction, thus millions/billions/whatever of light "waves" are required to illuminate the entire room.

I apologize for the incoherence and run-ons above. I hope I'm getting to his question.
 
aaroncomp said:
I think what he's asking (purely out of curiosity I assume, because I can see no practical application from this knowledge?) is if anyone knows how many actual "waves" travel from a given sound source at once. That is, he understands basically what a soundwave is, etc. but he wants to know in all planes (three-dimensionally), how many "waves" are shooting out at once. Like, when you pluck a guitar string, and that one oscillation shoots off, but simultaneously in every direction, meaning 1 individual wave fills its 1 area of sound space (for lack of a better word), and the number he's theoretically seeking would be how many waves are exiting in sum. Same thing applies for, say, a light bulb. The "waves" of light distribute throughout a room, but 1 ray only goes 1 direction, thus millions/billions/whatever of light "waves" are required to illuminate the entire room.

I apologize for the incoherence and run-ons above. I hope I'm getting to his question.

Yes this is exactly what I'm asking. The thing that got me thinking about it is reading about when waves "run into each other" (dealing with in and out of phase, etc.). I started wondering exactly how many "waves" you're talking about. There's got to be a finite number, right?
 
aaroncomp said:
So I found this, which also reminded me that, of course, a sound wave has no dimension (correct me if I'm wrong)...

Scroll down to the "Waves in Three Dimensions" section:

http://physics.mtsu.edu/~wmr/waves.htm

Yes this is exactly it: (from that link above)

"Consider a perfect three-dimensional wave launched from a small source and radiating sound in all directions. The sound waves move away from the source and the crests of the waves form a series of concentric spheres centered on the sound source."

How many waves? Just curious, as you said.
 
This is sort of a specious question, a little like "how many atoms does it take to make a person?"

First off, the spherical wavefront image is not accurate in the real world. That's what a theoretically perfect wave would "look" like if the medium it traveled in was perfectly still and the source of the disturbance was a point or a perfect sphere itself (like a perfectly-shaped ball suddenly expanding). I reality the media (the air, the walls, etc.) are different, the air's in motion and has other sounds already moving around in it too; the guitar string is not a point source but a long line; much of what you actually hear is the part of the string vibration resonating in the body of the guitar, resonating, and projecting out the the sound hole, diffracting at the edges of the hole and off the strings themselves...

Further, one pluck sets the string to vibrating, and then it stays vibrating for a long time if you don't pluck it again and just let it ring. So the sound waves created begina and gradually fall off. When do you say the string has stopped vibrating and there are no more sound waves being produced? When you can't hear it any more? When a precies measurement device says the string has stilled?

Finally, the concept of "a" sound wave is merely a conceptual model. What you hear is due to the motion of the air striking your ears. This is the sum of all the motions of all the disturbances going on at one time. If you could see it it would look like a random mush of air molecules moving about. There is no way to separate the part of the total disturbance caused by the guitar from all the rest -- there are not a bunch of physical spherical wavefronts you can see individually and say, "ah, there's one of the guitar waves..."

All in all, you can only do this sort of counting in a theoretical imagined state that does not exist in the real world.

So the real answer is -- it's not possible to know how "many waves" there are.

If for some reason you're curious about how many waves there might be from a perfect point source in a perfectly still and homogenous medium, the first answer tells you all you need to know. The point source would have a single frequency of vibration and no harmonics, so the frequency tells you how many wave fronts pass out from the source per second. Then you multiply the frequency by the how long the source vibrates. Voila -- x number of waves, a totally imaginary and useless number except for it value as a mental exercise.
 
Last edited:
AlChuck said:
This is sort of a specious question, a little like "how many atoms does it take to make a person?"

First off, the spherical wavefront image is not accurate in the real world. That's what a theoretically perfect wave would "look" like if the medium it traveled in was perfectly still and the source of the disturbance was a point or a perfect sphere itself (like a perfectly-shaped ball suddenly expanding). I reality the media (the air, the walls, etc.) are different, the air's in motion and has other sounds already moving around in it too; the guitar string is not a point source but a long line; much of what you actually hear is the part of the string vibration resonating in the body of the guitar, resonating, and projecting out the the sound hole, diffracting at the edges of the hole and off the strings themselves...

Further, one pluck sets the string to vibrating, and then it stays vibrating for a long time if you don't pluck it again and just let it ring. So the sound waves created begina and gradually fall off. When do you say the string has stopped vibrating and there are no more sound waves being produced? When you can't hear it any more? When a precies measurement device says the string has stilled?

Finally, the concept of "a" sound wave is merely a conceptual model. What you hear is due to the motion of the air striking your ears. This is the sum of all the motions of all the disturbances going on at one time. If you could see it it would look like a random mush of air molecules moving about. There is no way to separate the part of the total disturbance caused by the guitar from all the rest -- there are not a bunch of physical spherical wavefronts you can see individually and say, "ah, there's one of the guitar waves..."

All in all, you can only do this sort of counting in a theoretical imagined state that does not exist in the real world.

So the real answer is -- it's not possible to know how "many waves" there are.

If for some reason you're curious about how many waves there might be from a perfect point source in a perfectly still and homogenous medium, the first answer tells you all you need to know. The point source would have a single frequency of vibration and no harmonics, so the frequency tells you how many wave fronts pass out from the source per second. Then you multiply the frequency by the how long the source vibrates. Volia -- x number of waves, a totally imaginary and useless number except for it value as a mental exercise.

Ok. Thanks much for the lengthy response. And now that you mentioned it, how many atoms make up a person? :)
 
440 right, i was thinking of the harmonic frequency of light 144,000 something other.

when visualizing sound waves, you must keep in mind that all sound is, is the compression of air molecules. Your basically asking, how many air molecules are there in any given instance and in what manner do they move about when i pluck my guitar string. If you could see air particles, it would look like static on a tv screen, but 3d and more choatic.

its funny a whole industry is based around ones ability to move air molecules in such a way. Now if only someone could figure out why humans take some sound as pleasing and some sound as annoying.
 
440 right, i was thinking of the harmonic frequency of light 144,000 something other.

Huh?

Visible light has frequencies of between about 40,000 to 75,000 GHz. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, but the speed of propgation of a wave is not the same as the frequency of the wave.
 
famous beagle said:
Ok. Thanks much for the lengthy response. And now that you mentioned it, how many atoms make up a person? :)

7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in a 160 lb. person. :p
 
bewildered said:
when visualizing sound waves, you must keep in mind that all sound is, is the compression of air molecules.

And rarefication. Don't forget that. A passing pressure wave has in it's wake a partial vacuum. Sound waves have a pressure trough as well as a crest. The pressure varies above and below the ambient air pressure as the wave passes.

Interesting tidbit:

SPL is the difference between the highest and lowest pressure. This leads to a theoretical maximum possible SPL of about 194 db, according to NASA, where the passing pressure wave would have an absolute vacuum in it's wake. At that point, the pressure wave would be almost rock-solid, and pretty much splatter you into very tiny pieces.

Kinda cool.
 
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