Name: Production of Sound in Humans
Uploaded: 2019-07-19
Duration: 5 min 18 s
Description: Have you ever wondered how sound is produced in human beings? Come on, let's watch this video to explore and understand how we can talk and sing.

Question

Look at the diagram. An electric circuit including a buzzer is set up inside a glass tank.

Mia switches the circuit on so the buzzer makes a loud noise. She then switches on a pump that gradually pumps the air out of the tank. Mia observes that the sound gets quieter until she cannot hear the sound at all. Explain Mia’s observations.

Accepted Answer

When Mia switches the circuit on, an electric current is passed into the buzzer, and it vibrates and makes a loud noise. The vibrating buzzer makes the nearby air molecules to vibrate back and forth. These vibrating air molecules make the next layer of air molecules to vibrate, and so on. In this way, ultimately all the air molecules around the buzzer start vibrating back and forth. When these vibrating air molecules fall on our ears, we can hear the sound of buzzer. In this experiment, Mia is removing the air out of the tank with the help of a pump. If there is no air between the vibrating buzzer and the ear, then the vibrations of the buzzer cannot reach our ears and hence we cannot hear the sound of it. This is because sound needs a medium for its propagation. Sound cannot propagate through a vacuum, because it does not contain any particles to pass on the vibrations.

Important Questions on Sound

Learn and Prepare for any exam you want !