I always have seen sound waves shown as sine waves in textbooks and basically every other context in which you learn about sound, but what’s the actual three dimensional shape it makes. Are they just compressional waves?
In: Physics
Yep, they’re compression waves. It depends on what’s making the sound, and what the sound is travelling through. I usually describe them as being like a stretched slinky. If you give it a push and pull, that compression will travel along the length of the slinky.
If you had an ideal omnidirectional source of sound (i.e. something that sends out sound in every direction equally), the wave would be like a bubble of squashed air that expands, but gets weaker as it goes further.
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