I understand that the ear drum vibrates to create sound, but when your ears are 100% plugged, how can sound waves vibrate the drum? And I’m not talking about not hearing a jet engine, I’m talking about things more along the lines of everyday noise.
In: 11
Sound waves travel through all sorts of things, really, almost everything. Your ear drum is SUPER sensitive. So if you put your fingers in your ears, or ear plugs, or whatever, some sound waves are still making it to your ear drums. Also, they can pass other ways too beyond just your ear canal. They can travel through your mouth and even through your neck and head.
If you were to take something that vibrated, for example, and put it up against your head or neck or a tooth in your mouth (like an electric toothbrush) you would hear all those things regardless of having your ears plugged.
Not all sound goes in through your ear canal. Your whole head can act as a receiver. That’s the way bone conduction headphones work. They don’t pump sound into your ear, they put it in through your skull. Since your eardrum is connected to your head, those vibrations can still make it through.
Bones and soft tissues can also conduct vibrations. Induction headphones are a good axample of this, where they work by sending vibrations into the tissues surrounding the ears rather than into the ear canals themselves.
Sound is vibration, is can travel both through solids, liquid, and gasses. There is a lot of energy lost when it goes from a gas to a solid but that does not mean it does not happen.
Hit a wall and the vibration travel tough the wall and people on the other side hear it. Put a speaker in a fridge and you can heat it from the outside even if there is a gas-tight seal around the door. The sound travels tough the wall just like it can go trou a blockage in your ears.
The reason you think your voice sounds different in recording than you are used to is that all the sound that travel in you had to the ear are missing, the recoding is of the sound that travels out through the air.
Noise can travel through any type of matter, not just gas. Really it’s just vibrations. As long as there’s something to vibrate there’s something to carry sound. Plugging your ears blocks the sound coming through the air, but that just means it travels through your body to get there instead. Just like you can still make sounds with your mouth closed and nose plugged, only in reverse.
Stand on one side of the doorway and have a conversation with someone on the other side. You can hear them fine, just like your eardrums can hear things from the outside world.
Now close the door. If the person is still talking, you can still hear them both through the door, but also through the walls/windows around the door.
Even though you plug up your ear holes with your fingers, sound can still get to your eardums in other ways, such as through the bone and tissue.
> I understand that the ear drum vibrates to create sound
It’s more that the eardrums vibrate to best pass that vibration from air to the ossicles, which lever and vibrate to best pass that vibration to the oval window, another drum like surface on the cochlea. Which vibrates to pass that vibration into the fluid filled cochlea, which makes the basilar membrane move…
So you see, the ear drum is more about one step in passing that vibration on to the cochlea, than it is about ‘creating’ sound. Which then explains what others were talking about, how sound can actually skip the ear drum, or be transmitted through bone (bone conduction)
Latest Answers