Eli5: how does a microphone work?
In: Engineering
Don’t quote me as i’m going based off what I roughly remember from my engineering class.
So, sound is just vibrations in the air. The air wiggles, how much it wiggles is the frequency (Lower tones wiggle the air slow, higher tones wiggle the air very fast)
Microphones have a tiny sheet, kinda like your eardrum, it vibrates once the soundwaves reach it. This sheet is attached to a magnet, it vibrates too. Around the magnet is a coil of super thin wire, and when you move a magnet through a coil of wire it creates a little electric current. This little bit of electric current is then amplified, it makes that electric signal much ‘louder’ in the sense of it used to be a tiny current, but now it’s a big current that can be pushed over to a speaker or mixing board or whatever recording device and understood.
Funnily enough, speakers are essentially just a reverse microphone. The current from the microphone in turn uses a coil in the speaker to vibrate a magnet attached to a diaphragm. *(But this diaphragm tends to be bigger, like if you’ve ever seen a subwoofer playing bass tones, it vibrates like crazy)*
A couple fun science youtubers (I believe ElectroBOOM has done it) has messed with this concept, and has turned a microphone into a speaker itself, and made ‘speakers’ out of random items by just vibrating them.
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