What is your favourite kind of music? Let’s discover five stunning sound facts for kids.
Sound waves are a kind of energy that is released by vibrations. When we hear noises it is because our body is processing those vibrations. The eardrum is a thin membrane inside your ear which vibrates at the same frequency as sounds you hear. The smallest bones in the body are in the ear and transfer the vibrations from the eardrum to the brain. Your brain then translates these vibrations into sounds such as words, noises, and music. That way you can hear and understand them.
When sound waves travel through the air they can bounce off flat surfaces and return back to their source. This means that the sound will repeat over again. When sound hits soft surfaces they are absorbed, this is why rooms with lots of soft things such as carpets, curtains, and pillows are quieter. All around the world there are places where you can hear interesting echoes. One of the coolest echoes happens at the Kukulkan Pyramid in Mexico. If you visit the pyramid and clap your hands at the bottom of it the sound will echo back to you. The echo doesn’t sound like a clap, it actually sounds like a bird chirping.
This is a skill called echolocation and it helps animals that can’t see or have poor eyesight. One of the animals that use echolocation in bats, they fly around and hunt at night and have poor eyesight. They create sounds while flying and can tell what is nearby because they hear the echoes and can tell how far the echoes travelled.
When making movies sometimes movies need sounds that don’t happen on set. So, how does it sound so real? The sound effects are made through a type of practical effect called foley. Foley artists make all kinds of sounds which can be added to movies. A cool example is the sound of people walking in snow. That sound is made by placing corn starch in a leather pouch and squishing it. So, the characters can have a snow day whenever they want.
A good way to see how vibrations make sound is by looking at the skin of a drum. When you strike a drum with your hand or a drumstick it starts to vibrate. If you look closely you can see it move. These vibrations are what make the sounds. String instruments allow for different sounds by tightening each string differently or having different sizes of string. These strings vibrate differently because of their size and how tightly they are tuned. Even pianos use vibrating strings inside the piano to create sounds.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about sound as much as we loved teaching you about it. Now that you know how majestic the sound is, you can move on to learn more about STEM like: Forces, Gravity and Friction.
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