Eli5 can music be produced in pure Argon Gas? Would playing musical instruments and hearing the music they produce travel via Argon be a new and possibly better musical experience than regular air?

Question

Argon because its cheap.

In: 0

Answer 1

Because argon is gas and physic applies, there would be no difference to how music sounds, it would be just a bit more quiet and sound would travel shorter distance because argon is heavier than air so soundvaves would waste more energy to travel through

Answer 2

Nitrogen, Oxygen and Argon have very similar speeds of sound, so it would sound pretty similar.

If you played music in Helium it would sound very different. Not higher pitch, but higher timbre.

Answer 3

There’s no reason that any conventional instrument like a trumpet or a violin or your voice would not work in argon. And it would sound different.

Let’s talk about the human voice because many of us have had an experience with speaking in a different gas.

Your voice is generated by the interaction of two things. Your vocal cords vibrate at a specific combination of frequencies that depend both on the sound you’re trying to make and the size of your vocal cords. People with larger vocal cords have lower voices when attempting to make the “same” sounds. This is partly because the longer vocal cords inherently vibrate at a lower frequency, and partly because the larger size of the voice box and air cavity have different resonant frequencies.

Resonance determines which of the frequencies in your voice get amplified enough to be audible. Since your vocal tract is a specific size, it “wants” to vibrate at specific frequencies where the wavelength fits neatly within the voice box. That’s how a significant pressure wave gets generated that travels out of your mouth.

The speed of a wave, like sound, is the product of wavelength and frequency. The appropriate wavelengths for your voice box are fixed because your voice box doesn’t change size based on the atmosphere. So if the speed of sound changes, the resonant frequencies associated with those wavelengths change. Different combinations of sound waves will be the ones that are able to travel out of your mouth. If the speed of sound goes up, so will the resonant frequencies. If the speed of sound goes down, so will the resonant frequencies.

Argon has a slower speed of sound than air (about 323 m/s vs 343 m/s). It’s about 6% slower in argon. This would cause a noticeable pitch difference, but it wouldn’t be huge like helium (973 m/s) is.

Would it sound better? Probably not, because the instruments are tuned to be played in air.