| Inside your ear is a very thin piece of skin called the eardrum. When your eardrum vibrates, your brain interprets the vibrations as sound -- that's how you hear. Rapid changes in air pressure are the most common thing to vibrate your eardrum. | ||
| An object produces sound when it vibrates in air (sound can also travel through liquids and solids, but air is the transmission medium when we listen to speakers). When something vibrates, it moves the air particles around it. Those air particles in turn move the air particles around them, carrying the pulse of the vibration through the air as a traveling disturbance. | ||
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When an object vibrates, it pushes on the surrounding air particles on the side of the vibration. These particles then collide with the particles in front of them, causing a chain reaction which causes sound to travel through air. Whenever the object making the sound flexes away, it pulls on these surrounding air particles, creating a drop in pressure that pulls in on more surrounding air particles which are even further out and so on. The decrease in pressure is called rarefaction.
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