SCI409L: BIOPHYSICS LABORATORY (FINALS) The Nature of Sound Waves

LONGITUDINAL SOUND WAVES

ONLINE EXPERIMENT 6: SOUND PROPERTIES AND
HEARING
Sound
- Humans can hear between 20-20,000 hz
- Form of a wave traveling through a medium
- Light does not require a medium
- Types
- Infrasound
- Ultrasound
- Sound

Periodic Waves

- In the drawing, one cycle is shaded in color.

- The amplitude A is the maximum excursion of a
particle of the medium from the particles
undisturbed position.
- The wavelength is the horizontal length of one cycle
of the wave.
- Length (in meters) of one vibration
- The period is the time (in seconds) required for one
complete cycle.
- The frequency is related to the period and has units
of Hz, or s-1.
- Number of cycles per second

- The distance between adjacent condensations is

equal to the wavelength of the sound wave.
- Wavelength – distance from one compression to
another compression
 - Loudness is an attribute of a sound that depends
primarily on the pressure amplitude of the wave

Activity 1: Human Voice and Hearing

Extended Activity: Amplitude and Loudness

- Individual air molecules are not carried along with
the wave.
- Molecules that travel in a particular distance reaches
your ear

THE FREQUENCY OF A SOUND WAVE

- The frequency is the
number of cycles per
second.(Hz/sec-1)
- A sound with a single
frequency is called a pure
tone.
- The brain interprets the
frequency in terms of the
subjective quality called
The Science of Hearing
pitch.
The science of hearing - Douglas L. Oliver
How did you detect that noise from afar and target its
THE PRESSURE AMPLITUDE OF A SOUND WAVE maker with such precision?
- The ability to recognize sounds and identify their
location is possible thanks to the auditory system.
- 2 Main parts: the ear and the brain
- Ear – convert sound energy into neural
signals
- Brain – receive and process the
information those signals contain.
To understand how that works
- We can follow a sound on its journey into the ear.
- The source of a sound creates vibrations that travel
as waves of pressure through particles in air, liquids,
or solids.
- But our inner ear, called the cochlea, is actually filled
with saltwater-like fluids.
First problem to solve: how to convert those sound waves - However, a low-frequency sound coming from one
wherever they’re coming from, into waves in the fluid. side will reach the near ear microseconds before the
- The solution is the eardrum, or tympanic far one.
membrane, and the tiny bones of the middle ear. - And high-frequency sounds will sound more intense
- Those convert the large movements of the eardrum to the near ear because they’re blocked from the far
into pressure waves in the fluid of the cochlea. ear by your head.
- When sound enters the ear canal, it hits the eardrum - These strands of information reach special parts of
and makes it vibrate like the head of a drum. the brainstem that analyze time and intensity
- The vibrating eardrum jerks a bone called the differences between your ears.
hammer, which hits the anvil and moves the third - They send the results of their analysis up to the
bone called the stapes. auditory cortex.
- Its motion pushes the fluid within the long chambers - Now, the brain has all the information it needs
of the cochlea. - the patterns of activity that tell us what the
- Once there, the sound vibrations have finally been sound is,
converted into vibrations of a fluid, and they travel - and information about where it is in space.
like a wave from one end of the cochlea to the other.
- A surface called the basilar membrane runs the Not everyone has normal hearing.
length of the cochlea. - Hearing loss is the third most common chronic
- It’s lined with hair cells that have disease in the world.
specialized components called stereocilia, - Exposure to loud noises and some drugs can kill hair
which move with the vibrations of the cells, preventing signals from traveling from the ear
cochlear fluid and the basilar membrane. to the brain.
- This movement triggers a signal that travels through - Diseases like osteosclerosis freeze the tiny bones in
the hair cell, into the auditory nerve, then onward to the ear so they no longer vibrate.
the brain, which interprets it as a specific sound. - And with tinnitus, the brain does strange things to
- When a sound makes the basilar membrane vibrate, make us think there’s a sound when there isn’t one.
not every hair cell moves - only selected ones, - But when it does work, our hearing is an incredible,
depending on the frequency of the sound. elegant system.
- This comes down to some fine engineering. - Our ears enclose a fine-tuned piece of biological
- At one end, the basilar membrane is stiff, vibrating machinery that converts the cacophony of vibrations
only in response to short wavelength, high- in the air around us into precisely tuned electrical
frequency sounds. impulses that distinguish claps, taps, sighs, and flies.
- The other is more flexible,vibrating only in the
presence of longer wavelength, low-frequency
Sound: Crash Course Physics
sounds.
- So, the noises made by the seagull and mosquito - Studying sound waves has helped doctors learn
vibrate different locations on the basilar membrane, more about our ears, and has allowed engineers to
like playing different keys on a piano. But that’s not design things like microphones and speakers.
all that’s going on. - Biologists have even used the science of sound to
figure out how animals like elephants can
The brain still has another important task to fulfill: communicate over long distances -- when we can’t
identifying where a sound is coming from. even hear them doing it.
- For that, it compares the sounds coming into the - It all comes down to the fact that SOUND is a wave,
two ears to locate the source in space. which travels through a medium like air or water.
- A sound from directly in front of you will reach both - And knowing that sound is a wave is
your ears at the same time. important, because it means that we can
- You’ll also hear it at the same intensity in use the physics of waves to describe the
each ear. qualities of sound.
- When you think of a wave, you probably think of the - And your eardrums basically work the same way! As
kind you see at the ocean, or the ones you made pressure waves pass through, they make your
when you jumped on that trampoline last time. eardrum vibrate.
- Those waves produce ripples that run perpendicular - Your brain then interprets those vibrations as sound.
to the direction that the wave is traveling in. But not all sounds are the same.
- But sound is the other kind of wave: it’s a - Even before we knew much about physics, humans
longitudinal wave, meaning that the wave’s back- were describing sound in terms of certain qualities:
and-forth motion happens in the same direction in mainly, by things like ‘loudness’ and ‘pitch’.
which the wave travels. - Our understanding of those qualities helped shape
- Say you get a text message on your phone, and it the development of music -- which we’ll talk more
makes a nice, bright little ‘ding!’ sound. about next time.
- What actually happened? Like, on a physical level? - But there’s also a more physics-y side to those
- Your phone’s speaker contains a diaphragm -- a qualities of music.
piece of stiff material, usually in the shape of a cone. - Pitch can be high or low, and it corresponds to the
- When you got the message, the electronics inside ‘frequency’ of the wave.
the speaker made the diaphragm move back and - So, air that’s vibrating back and forth more times per
forth, which vibrated the air around your phone. second will have a higher pitch, and air that’s
- That made the atoms and molecules in the air move vibrating fewer times per second will have a lower
back and forth. pitch.
- Then, those moving particles vibrated the air around - Humans hear sounds best when the vibrations are
them -- and as the process continued, the sound somewhere between 20 per second on the low end
wave spread outward. [ding!] and 20,000 per second on the high end.
- Sorry! I’m just gonna turn this off now. Anyway, - As we get older and lose more of the cells that help
physicists sometimes describe sound waves in terms us detect sound, we start to lose the ability to hear
of the movement of these particles in the air -- in higher-pitched sounds.
what’s known as a displacement wave. - Some building security companies will take
- But by moving particles in the air, sound waves also advantage of this, using devices that emit a high-
do something else: pitched noise that most people over the age of 25
- They cause the air to compress and expand can’t hear.
-- which is why sound waves are sometimes - The idea is that since kids and teens can hear it, and
described as ‘pressure waves’. it’s super annoying to them, they won’t hang out
- As the wave spreads through the air, the near the building.
particles end up bunching together in some - But some sounds are too high or low for any humans
places, and ‘spreading out’ in others. to hear.
- Together, all that bunching and spreading- - Sounds that are too high in pitch are called
out causes areas of high pressure and low ultrasonic, and sounds that are too low are called
pressure to form and move through the air. infrasonic.
- It’s useful to describe sound waves as pressure - Dog whistles, for example, use an ultrasonic pitch
waves, because we can build devices that detect that’s too high for us, but is perfectly audible to
those changes in pressure. dogs.
- That’s how some microphones work, for example: - Elephants, on the other hand, use INFRAsonic sound
They use a diaphragm stretched over a sealed to communicate with each other across long
compartment, and as sound waves pass by, they distances.
create areas of lower or higher pressure in the - They can hear these calls from several kilometers
compartment. away, but we can’t hear them at all.
- The differences in pressure cause the diaphragm to - Another aspect that shapes sound is its loudness --
move back and forth, which electronics then when you increase the intensity of a sound, you
translate into audio data increase its loudness, and vice versa.
- We’ve talked about the intensity of a wave before: - That’s why most of the time, you’ll hear the loudness
it’s the wave’s power over its area, measured in of a sound described using the more familiar decibel
Watts per square meter. unit -- a tenth of a bel.
- We’ve also said that the intensity of a wave is - To find the loudness of a sound when you know its
proportional to the wave’s amplitude, squared. And intensity, you take the base-10 logarithm of its
the farther you are from the source of a wave, the intensity, over the reference intensity of 1 picowatt
lower its intensity -- by the square of the distance per square meter.
between you and the source. - Then, you multiply that number by 10 to get the
- And just as there’s a range of pitches that humans sound’s decibel level.
can hear, there’s also a range of sound wave - We can use this equation to convert the intensity of
intensity that humans can comfortably hear. that noisy rock concert -- which we said was 1 Watt
- Generally, people can safely hear sounds from about per square meter -- to decibels.
1 picowatt per square meter, up to 1 Watt per - First, we take the base 10 log of 1 Watt per square
square meter -- which is about as loud as a rock meter, over 1 picowatt per square meter.
concert, if you’re near the speakers. - Now, 1 divided by 1 x 10^-12 is just 1 x 10^12.
- The sound waves coming from a jet plane that’s 30 - So what we really want to do is take the base 10 log
meters away, for example, probably has an intensity of 1 x 10^12 -- or a trillion -- watts per square meter.
of around 100 Watts per square meter. - What a logarithm asks you to do, is find the power
- Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been that close to a that you would need to raise the base to in order to
roaring jet plane. get the number in parentheses.
- But there’s a reason people who work on the tarmac - In other words, we’re looking for the exponent of 10
at airports use those heavy-duty headphones. that would equal 1 x 10^12. Which is just 12.
- Below 1 picowatt per square meter, sounds are just - To finish off the calculation of decibels from
too soft for us to detect them. intensity, we multiply that value -- 12-- by 10 to get
- And although we will HEAR sounds above a Watt per the decibel level of the rock concert, where you
square meter, they tend to hurt our ears. were standing: 120 decibels. Ouch.
- But here’s a weird thing about loudness and - You’ll notice that as the source of a sound moves
intensity: it’s not a linear relationship. closer to you, it gets louder, and as it moves away, it
- Generally, a sound wave needs to have ten times the gets softer.
intensity to sound twice as loud to us. - That makes sense, since the closer you are to the
- This relationship holds true as long as the sound is source of a sound, the greater the intensity of the
toward the middle of the range of frequencies we wave that hits your ear.
can hear. - But have you ever noticed that the pitch of the
- So, instead of directly measuring the loudness of sound changes, too? It’s called the ‘Doppler effect’:
sounds by their intensity, we use units called As a source of sound moves toward you, the pitch of
‘decibels’ -- which are based on bels. the sound you hear increases. And as the source
- Bels convert a sound wave’s intensity to a moves away, the pitch decreases.
‘logarithmic scale’, where every notch on the scale is - To see why, imagine you’re standing on the
ten times higher than the previous one. The scale sidewalk, when suddenly you hear an ambulance
starts off with an intensity of 1 picowatt per square siren start up.
meter, corresponding to 0 bels. - It’s coming from down the road, and it seems to be
- So a sound that’s 1 bel is ten times as intense as a moving toward you.
sound that’s 0 bels. And a sound that’s 2 bels is 10 - The ambulance is continuously emitting sound waves
times as intense as a sound that’s 1 bel ---- but 100 at a certain frequency, in the form of that siren.
times as intense as a sound that’s 0 bels. - But as the ambulance moves toward you, the
- Measuring everything in bels can be kind of ambulance is also driving toward those sound waves.
annoying, because sometimes you want to talk - So, the peaks that hit your eardrums are closer
about sounds that are, say, 3.4 bels without having together -- even though they’re moving at the same
to deal with decimal points. speed -- and you get hit by them more often.
- Which means you hear a higher-pitched sound.
 - At the same time, it keeps emitting more sound,
which adds more peaks to those earlier sound waves
that are heading your way.
- What you end up with, is a sound wave with a higher
frequency than before. That’s what hits your
eardrum, so you hear a sound that’s higher in pitch
than the one you heard before the ambulance
started moving.
- As the ambulance passes you and starts to drive
away down the road, the opposite happens.
- The sound waves are still coming toward you, but
the ambulance is driving away from them.
- So the peaks that hit your eardrum are farther apart,
and you hear a sound with a lower pitch.
- The Doppler effect isn’t unique to sound waves,
though -- it happens with light, too. Which means we
can actually use it to measure the distance of stars --
but more on that much later.
- For now, you learned about sound waves, and how
they move particles back and forth to create
differences in pressure.
- We also talked about pitch, and how the intensity of
a sound wave changes with amplitude and distance.
Finally, we covered decibels, as well as the Doppler
effect.

Pre Test
1. You can use either Physics Toolbox or phyphox to
determine the tone of sound.
- True
2. Mach the appropriate description
- It is the maximum excursion of a particle of
the medium from the particle's undisturbed
position - Amplitude
- It is the horizontal length of one cycle of the
wave - Wavelength
- It is the time required for one complete
cycle - Period
- It s the number of cycles per unit time -
Frequency
- Pitch - Frequency
- Loudness - Amplitude
- Pure tone - single frequency

3. Three trials must be done in Activity one to

determine the wavelength.
- True
4. In Activity 2, you are required to graph Amplitude
versus pitch.
- False
 EXPERIMENT 7: HEAT TRANSFER
Convection

Conceptual Example: Hot Water Baseboard Heating and

Refrigerators
- Hot water baseboard heating units are mounted on
the wall next to the floor. The cooling coil in a
refrigerator is mounted near the top of the
refrigerator. Each location is designed to maximize
the production of convection currents. Explain how,

Radiation
- The process in which energy is transferred by means
of electromagnetic waves
- A material that is a good absorber is also a good
emitter
- A material that absorbs completely is called a
perfect blackbody
Conduction
- The process whereby heat is transferred directly
through a material, with any bulk motion of the
material playing no role in the transfer.
- One mechanism for conduction occurs when the
atoms or molecules in a hotter part of the material
vibrate or move with greater energy than those in a
cooler part
- By means of collisions, the more energetic molecules
pass on some of their energy to their less energetic
neighbors
- Materials that conduct heat well are called thermal
conductors, and those that conduct heat poorly are
called thermal insulators.

Thermal Insulators
- Materials with dead air spaces are usually excellent
thermal insulators
 - A thermos bottle minimizes heat transfer via
conduction, convection, and radiation.

- The Halogen cooktop stove creates electromagnetic

energy that passes through the ceramic top and is
absorbed directly by the bottom of the pot

Link:http://htv-au.vlabs.ac.in/heat-thermodynamics/
Newtons_Law_of_Cooling/experiment.html

Activity 1: Newton’s Law of Cooling

Forensic Problem:
At 10:23 PM the temperature of the victim is 80 °F. The
roomtemperature is 68 °F. After one (1) hour the
temperature ofthe victim is 78.5 °F. before dying, the
temperature of ahuman body is 98.6 °F. What time did the
person died? (hint:find the k first)

Activity 2: Heat Transfer by Conduction

Activity 3: Heat Transfer by Radiation

Activity 4: Heat Transfer by Convection

- Observations of a Convection Current experiment:
- YouTube's best convection currents video!
Science demonstration for your students
- Convection Experiment
 SCI409L: BIOPHYSICS LABORATORY (FINALS) Combination of resistor in a circuit

ONLINE EXPERIMENT 8: Combination of Resistors

Objectives
- determine the resistance by standard color code.
- determine resistance by voltmeter-ammeter
method.
- verify the laws on series /parallel resistors.

Reading of resistance of a resistor

Series
- One end is connected to the other resistor
- If one is inactivated, current cannot pass through it
- Current is constant all throughout
- Use series connection to increase the total
resistance of a circuit
- 4 bands: 1st digit, 2nd digit, multiplier, and tolerance

Parallel
- Both ends are connected to the other ends of the
other resistor
- Voltage in each resistor are constant
- If one is destroyed, it will still work as it will just pass
through the other resistors

Example
a. Calculate the total resistance of the circuit…

Rt = R1 + R2 + R3
- Use the table to determine resistance Rt = 2Ω + 2Ω + 6Ω
Rt = 10 Ω

b. Calculate the total resistance of the circuit.

Phet Simulation
https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/circuit-construction-kit-
dc-virtual-lab/latest/circuit-construction-kit-dc-virtual-
lab_en.html

Activity 1: Determination of Resistance

- Use the color bands to determine the resistance

Activity 2: Series Resistors