Hear the pressure

Sound

I am writing this in my room while listening to some music, sound is something that has always interested me from its method of production to its reproduction to audio capture to storing audio all the way down to how we hear.

what is sound? sound is simply a pressure wave a simple transference of energy from the thing that generates the energy to the things. Imagine someone jumping into a swimming pool and how the waves travel outward from the impact of the person hitting the water that is a wave of energy travelling through the water. Now imagine a explosion (a big one) now the shock wave from the explosion is actually a sound be it a loud one its exactly the same thing, simply a pressure wave in a medium.

So what your hearing when you listen to music is ripples in the air these ripples then travel into your ear and get turned into a signal that your brain translates into something you can understand its all rather clever and complicated.

Sound recording and reproduction are also rather amazing to record a sound you need something to pick up the sound, way back in the day when the record was being invented it was a needle on a a material and the vibrations in the air were mirrored onto the material as it turned so when the process was reversed the audio imprint was converted back into audio. want proof of how simple it is? find a old record player with a working needle and and a record and place the needle into the grooves and spin the record without the player plugged in and you will be able to hear the audio just off the needle from its vibrations picked up off the disk. Think thats cool but old? well let me tell you CD's are actually just a digital version of a record it uses the same idea but it picks up the pits in the disk to read the data on the disk then gets processed and run through a amp so you can hear the audio.

I guess also you would like to hear things loud? this is the fun part, run a audio signal through an amp wich simply makes the electrical signal bigger then sends them to a speaker that is made of essentially three parts a coil a magnet and a diaphragm (the diaphragm is the part you can see). The signal is  from the amp is run into the coil that generates a magnetic field that acts on the magnet placed on the back of the diaphragm that then vibrates with with the electrical field.

OK well that's my again watered down explanation of the subject, sound is something that is around us every day and with nearly everyone listening to music every day I think people never stop and think about what sound really is we are only listening the pressure waves in the air. Whats my point? well my point is to show you that there is more in the world than you may have thought about before there is always that one step below what you can see, I encourage you all to take off the worlds cover and have a look at the inner workings and be amazed at what you find.

DFTBA