eli5: How a simple cone can amplify the sound?

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That wouldn’t require some way to add energy to the sound?

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5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I assume you are talking about a megaphone cone you shout through to make it louder.

Imagine you are on rollerskates and the difference of pushing against a brick wall or a large soft mattress to accelerate. The brick wall allows you to use more force and get a higher velocity.

The cone does something similar with the air from your lungs. As the cross section of the cone is quite small close to your mouth the air is a bit “stiffer” and gives the muscles in your lungs more to push against. You do use more energy than in open air and that is possible because of the shape.

In physics this is called “impedance matching” and a cone is a way to do this with sound waves.

There is also an added bonus of adding directivity to the sound which concentrates the energy on a smaller area.

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