Do quieter sounds travel at the same speed but for less distance?
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Yes, the speed of sound is dependent on the medium it is traveling through. It might travel faster or slower depending on factors like air temperature, or humidity. But if I say something loudly next to you whispering, for all intents and purposes, our noises are going the same speed.
Yes, but it depends on the medium they are traveling through (air, water, steel). Sound travels at the speed of atoms – meaning sound is the result of energy transferring through something by pushing on the atoms, which in turn push on their neighbors, and on and on.
Yup. So basically, think of air like a lake. When you make sound, you’re basically dropping a rock into the lake and making ripples. If you drop a small rock into the lake, you’re making pretty small ripples; but if you drop a big rock into the lake, you’re making big ripples. Thing is, no matter how big the rock is, the ripples all move at the same speed – some are just bigger so they last longer before smoothing out.
That’s also why it’s harder to hear quieter things when something loud is happening – when a big ripple hits a little ripple in the lake, the little one is swept up by the big one, and you only end up seeing the big one.
Through a given medium like air of a particular temperature and pressure, yes, however like others said it depends on the medium, and the frequency can have effects too. In particular, low frequency sounds can undergo a process called diffraction where they basically bend around obstacles while higher frequency sounds have to bounce more like a billiard ball. Thus, over long distances and past obstacles, lower frequency sounds may arrive first and have higher fidelity than high frequency sounds. Lower frequencies also sound subjectively quieter per a given dB level than high frequency sounds. This is why thunder sounds low and rumbly at first before the high frequency sounds arrive, a combination of diffraction and the sound actually conducting through the ground cause the low sound to get there early.
Almost, yes. Normal volumes of sound are ‘carried’ by the natural movement of air molecules. In solids and liquids they are like vibrations in a set of springs and weights, their speed controlled by the strength of the springs and mass of the weights.
Only in extremely loud cases does this change in air. The sound can correspond to so much particle motion that it actually does travel faster.
What humans interpret as sound is pressure waves moving through a medium
Those pressure waves move it different speeds depending on the medium in question.
A medium that is more dense will transmit sound more quickly up to a certain extent.
For example water is much more dense than air but not so dense as to block the pressure wave itself so sound travels much faster through water than it does through air.
Quieter sounds do not go as far because the pressure waves that they create are not as strong and therefore dissipate more quickly.
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Yes, all sounds travel at the speed of sound because they are all sounds!
However, there could be a difference in their frequency. Loud sounds have higher frequency & quieter ones have low frequency.
If you play two speakers at 20 meters distance from you, both songs will reach your ears at the same time. But the one with higher volume will be heard more clearly & it will dominate the low volume song due to higher frequency.
Just like light, sound wave perturbation speed depends on the medium. (yes light functions exactly the same e.g it can sometimes accelerate if passing through glass or slow down under other circumstances.)
To a first approximation (if you’re assuming an ideal gas, which is a good approximation for a lot of gasses like air), yes. But that is not totally true- there is also a [frequency dependence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound#:~:text=The%20dependence%20on%20frequency%20and,Hz%20it%20is%20relatively%20constant.). It’s generally insignificant, but it is there.
In air, the speed of sound increases by ~0.1 m/s if you change the frequency from 10 Hz to 100 Hz, for instance. A pretty negligible change, compared to the ~333 m/s approximation.
It also depends on what type of sound you’re talking about. In gases like air, there is only one type of sound wave. But in say, solids, sound (vibrations) has 2 types of waves. These can have different speeds.
>Do quieter sounds travel at the same speed but for less distance?
Yep. They dissipate faster, because they have less energy.
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