Acoustic vibrations
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Nyquist Team
We often think of sound as something that travels from a source to our ear, like a ball thrown across a room. In reality, however, the air that carries sound doesn't 'fly' anywhere. At the core of every auditory phenomenon lies a microscopic, organized dance of billions of particles that transfer energy to one another, almost not moving from their place.
Professional Definition
To understand the nature of sound, we must go down to the micro level and observe the behavior of individual elements of matter.
Acoustic vibrations – the movement of particles in an elastic medium relative to their equilibrium position.
Two concepts are key in this definition:
Elastic medium: Matter (air, water, steel) that, after deformation, wants to return to its original shape – similar to a compressed spring.
Equilibrium position: The resting point where a particle would be if there was silence.
Acoustics in Simple Words
Imagine a very crowded line of people standing one behind the other. Those are our air particles. If the person at the very end of the line (the sound source) pushes the person standing in front of them hard, that person will sway forward, hit the next person, and then return to their original position.
This push (energy/wave) will travel through the whole line to the cashier, but none of the people in line have changed their place. Each of them just leaned forward and returned.
This is exactly how acoustic vibrations work:
The speaker pushes the diaphragm and strikes the nearest air particles.
These particles hit their neighbors and return to their place (thanks to the elasticity of air).
The neighbors pass the hit further along.
This explains the fundamental difference between wind and sound.
Wind is a situation where the whole "line of people" moves from point A to B.
Sound (acoustic vibrations) is a situation where people stand still while only passing "nudges" to each other.
That’s why there is no sound in a vacuum – there are no "people in line" (particles) to pass the vibrations further.
Summary
Acoustic vibrations are the driving mechanism of sound. They do not involve the transport of matter, but rather the local, oscillatory motion of particles around their resting position. It is this ability of the medium (e.g., air) to vibrate and return to equilibrium that enables the transport of acoustic energy from the speaker to your ear.
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