[ELI5] Why does the wind sound way louder going past your ears, than if it is going straight into your ears?
In: Biology
Take a half empty water bottle with the cap off. If you blow straight into the mouth of the bottle it makes no noise. However, if you blow at just the right angle across the mouth the bottle, the bottle hums like a flute.
The ear canal, like the water bottle, is a dead end. When air blows directly into it, it gets blocks at the end of the cul-de-sac and stops moving and makes no noise. The air just gets stuck and does nothing.
When air blows across the opening of the ear or the bottle, it can flow continuously, and it creates eddies of swirling air around the opening that vibrate at a particular pitch that is quite a bit louder than the stream of air itself.
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