I mean, I understand that it’s difficult and has to be a very certain key at a specific volume, but I still don’t understand how that alone is capable of breaking a solid object. And why just glass? What about glass? Surely we can break other stuff too? I’m confused.
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TLDR: Sound is vibrations. Vibrations move things back and forth. Glass is already thin and fragile, so if you can scream the right note at it with enough power it will vibrate itself apart.
So, every object has what is called a resonate frequency. It’s the frequency of sound where the given thing shakes the hardest in response to the sound wave. If you play a note of that frequency the thing in question will attempt to vibrate in response. This is how f.i tuning forks work: strike the fork and they will vibrate at their resonate frequency, which is the note that we want to use to tune our instruments.
For glasses, you can hear the resonate frequency the same way: tap a glass and it produces a tone.
The thing about wine classes is that they tend to
* Have a resonate frequency around the higher parts of what trained humans can produce
* Are rigid, and so don’t damp vibrations very well
* Have thin, brittle walls that are easy to break.
If a trained opera singer sings the right note the sound wave will start to shake the glass. The glass will start resonating, and amplify the vibration. If the singer sings loud enough and long enough the glass will just keep absorbing that energy, vibrating faster, and faster, and with more and more power, until eventually the brittle glass gives and shatters.
You can do this with things that aren’t glass, but not a lot of things are as fragile as wine glasses are with the right resonating frequency.
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