Acoustics

The Physics of Sound

Sound can travel through any compressible medium such as gasses, liquids
& solids. Sound cannot travel in a vacuum as there are no molecules/no
medium for the vibrations created by sound sources to travel through. There
is no sound in space. Sounds (Mechanical Waves) travel as longitudinal
waves and travel through solids as transverse waves. Sound waves are
generated from a sound source such as a coin hitting the ground which
creates vibrations within the sound sources media.
As long as the sound source vibrates, the vibrations travel away from the
sound source Omni-directionally at the speed of sound which creates the
sound wave. Sound waves consist of areas of high and low pressure called
compressions and rarefactions. Sounds will travel faster through solids over
water or gasses most of the time.
Speed of sound through air 343 Meters / Second
Speed of sound through water 1482 Meters / Second
Speed of sound through aluminium 6420 Meters / Second

When objects exceed the speed of sound they create what we know as a Sonic
Boom. There is a great example of Sonic Booms in Jet Planes that exceed 343
Meters / Second because the sound waves travelling away from the sound source
are condensed together then expand so rapidly they create the sound of an
explosion.
Sound volume is measured in Decibels after Alexander Graham Bell the inventor
of the Telephone. Generally as a rule, a human whispering to another human
from about a meter away is around 10dB. If a gun was to be fired close to your
ear it would be around 140dB. When the decibels of a sound are too high it will
cause physical pain to the human ear. When a sound causes us pain it is usually
because this sound is above 130dB which we call the threshold of pain. Low
volume sounds which we can barely hear like a quiet whisper are usually around
5dB which we call the threshold of hearing.

Musical Instruments
Musical instruments create sound when part of them vibrate rapidly. For
example, the column of air inside of a wind instrument, the string on a string
instrument or the skin of a drum when beaten cause vibration which produce
sound waves in the air, which we hear as musical notes.
There is also a very important characteristic of sound which we know as pitch.
Pitch is altered by changes of frequency. The way frequencies rise or drop is
by the amount of cycles of compression and rarefactions which are put into
one word as oscillations. The faster or slower the sound waves are oscillating,
the higher or lower the frequency will be.
Pitch is measured in hertz. The perfect human hearing range is from 20Hz to
20,000Hz.

The easiest way to explain this is to think about an Acoustic Guitar and how
they work. If you get a plectrum and strum the thick low E string it will create a
low pitch frequency but if you strum the high e string it will make a much
higher pitch sound. This is because the high e string is a lot thinner and lighter
than the low E string so it can vibrate a lot faster creating a lot more
compression and rarefaction cycles.
The way that acoustic guitars create sound is mainly through the sound hole
which is on the body of the instrument. When you play a string on the guitar,
the sound waves travel through the body of the guitar and enter into the sound
hole where they bounce around inside before leaving the sound hole where they
were amplified.

If you look at that diagram of the acoustic guitar and look toward the tuning
pegs at the head of the body, you can see that these are where the strings are
tightened or loosened which which when combined with the thickness of each
string makes the pitch of each string higher or lower.
This is pretty much how all string instruments work.
Wood Wind instruments such as the saxophone, clarinet, bassoon etc have a
completely different way of making sound. These instruments contain a reed
which vibrates as the musician playing the instrument blows into it. These
instruments have tone holes along their bodies to make sure that each note
makes the correct tone.
When one of these holes is covered by the musician, it prevents air from
escaping that hole. For example if the closest hole to the musicians mouth is
covered it will lower the tone of the instrument as the distance that the air travels
through the instrument is increased as air exits through each open hole a little bit
at a time.

Drums work differently than both string & woodwind instruments in the fact
that acoustic drums use a skin which when struck causes a vibration to
reverberate inside the drum until it dissipates. The size and shape of the drum
are the main factors in which tone comes from which drum.

Human Hearing
Human audio perception, one of the five major senses, is the ability to detect
sound by vibrations, changes in the pressure of the surrounding medium with
the ear. Sound can be heard through gasses, solids and liquids.
Hearing is performed by the auditory system. The vibrations are detected by
the ear and transduced into nerve impulses that the brain picks up. For hearing
to be possible it requires molecules in the world around the human detecting
the vibrations.

Hearing Mechanism
In the human ear there are three main components: The outer ear, the middle
ear and the inner ear.
The Outer Ear
The visible part of the ear; the Pinna, which is there to focus the sound waves
being detected through the ear canal and into the ear drum (tympanic
membrane). In humans, the tympanic membrane separates the outer ear to
the middle ear as well as receiving sound waves from the air and transmitting
them to the ossicles in the middle ear. Basically the ear drums job is to
amplify vibrations travelling through the air into vibrations in fluid in the
inner ear.

Middle Ear
In the middle ear you have a small air filled drum which is next to the ear drum.
Contained in this drum there are three tiny bones altogether called the ossicles
which have the malleus, incus and stapes (easy way to remember is the hammer,
anvil and stirrup as they are shaped a little like these objects).
These bones help aid the transmission of vibration from the ear drum to the inner
ear.
The Stapes sends sound waves into the inner ear through the oval window. The
oval window is a flexible membrane which seperates the air filled middle ear away
from the fluid filled inner ear. There is another flexible membrane called the round
window which allows for the smooth displacement of the inner ear fluid when
sound waves enter.

Inner Ear
Inside the inner sit the sensory organs for hearing and balance.
The cochlea which is a spiral shaped tube full of two clear fluids; one called
Perilymph and the other Endolymph. Inside the cochlea lies the The Organ of
Corti, the sensory receptor which holds the hair cells, the nerve receptors for
hearing.
The vibrations caused by the middle ear push into the oval window in the
cochlea. The force of this movement causes the fluids contained in the cochlea to
stimulate the tiny hair cells. The individual hair cells respond to specific
frequencies which depending on the pitch which travel through into your inner
ear, only pitch specific hair cells are stimulated.
The hair cells which receive these signals are changed into nerve impulses and
are then sent out into the brain by the cochlea part of the auditory nerve. This
nerve then carries the impulses received by the cochlea into a relay station of
sorts inside the brain which are then carried into other brain pathways which end
in the auditory cortex.

Space Design

In a space where music is performed or recorded you have to take into

account the design of the space because sound travels for longer causing more
reverb in bigger emptier spaces. Sound will seem a lot clearer in a space
where there is less reverb or certain materials on the walls and floor to absorb
sound waves and deaden the vibrations.
If you were building a hall for opera to be performed, youd need a a big
space with a lot of reverb available. If you were building a smaller space for a
vocal booth you wouldnt want that reverb so you would try to deaden the
sound.
Reverb is caused by sound waves bouncing off of shiny, reflective surface.
The longer the sound travels, the more reverb there is. Because sound travels
in an omni-directional manner it will fill a room and reflect off of anything it
reaches. If you have a room with a reflective surface on the walls and floor
then you will get a lot more sound bouncing around. If the wall is treated with
some sort of sound proofing then you would get a lot less reverb as the sound
waves would be absorbed.

The perfect recording space requires a lot of work. You have to manually
construct nearly everything. Starting with soundproofing the floor and make it a
floating floor which helps a lot with noise isolation as well as drastically reduce
vibration and the spread of resonance; especially low frequencies which travel
further and tend to be much louder and boom if not controlled properly.

When you are sound proofing walls there are different factors to take into account
other than just making floating walls with the many different layers of materials to
help with noise isolation and sound absorption.

One of these other factors to consider when creating a space, soundproofing

and isolating a space to record in are Standing Waves (Room Modes).
Standing waves are created when a sound is reflected back into its own path
which causes phase differences which in turn interfere with the amplitude
response of a room.

When there are major problems with these standing waves they will actually
create increases & decreases in volume within different frequencies. There is
a correlation within the wavelengths which are effected by standing waves to
the distances between the opposing surfaces.
If you had an empty 10 x 7 bedroom that you wanted to turn into a
recording studio it would be very productive to sound proof the room in
some way. Although it is very helpful to soundproof a room, if there is too
much absorption in a room it can actually be bad for your recording.
You want to soundproof a room where you are recording so that any signal
the microphone picks up is only coming from the sound source and not being
reflected off the walls or flooring and changing the true sound from the
sound source which makes it harder for the producer to master the mix.
Sound proofing gives the producer a flat mix with truer sound.
There are multiple different methods used to deaden sound and make a
clearer sound source recording. One of these methods is to use acoustic foam
which is easy to apply to the walls in your recording room.

These panels also help to reduce flutter-echoes (slap-echoes) by absorbing

reflections that without the foam there to stop them, would have a long delay
time. The sound that isnt absorbed bounces off of these panels in an erratic
fashion which stops a lot of the sound waves from reaching the recording
microphone.
What flutter-echo essentially is; is sound waves bouncing around in a small
space giving the illusion of an echo which makes the sound seem as if it was
played/recorded in a much larger space.

There is another way to prevent flutter-echo and that is with diffusion.

How diffusion works is by preventing the standing waves from reflecting in a
straight line and reaching your ear too soon. This prevents that smearing effect
you hear when you have the reverb and the sound from the speakers coming
towards you at the same time.

Another acoustic room treatment technique is to use Bass traps in the corners of
the room youre transforming into a recording room/mixing room as corners are
where the low end frequencies have their highest and lowest points of pressure.

These bass traps help to control the low frequencies that can become
overbearing in a mix while also helping to prevent low frequencies from
leaking out of the room and annoying any neighbors or housemates.