How is bass something that we can audibly hear and also physically feel?
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If it’s loud enough you should be able to feel a wide range of pitches. There’s nothing special about bass except that its a longer wavelength and wiggles your skin at a more easily felt frequency.
To expand on that a bit, sound is a longitudinal wave. It’s air molecules being rhythmically pushed and pulled, and that energy is transferred forward by contact of other air molecules. Your hearing a sound is your eardrum being wiggled by the motion of the air. Loud bass is just imparting that energy on other parts of you not specifically meant to receive sound.
Sound waves, as you likely know, cause things to vibrate. When we ‘hear’ things, it is our eardrum vibrating. Now, our eardrum evolved to vibrate at many many frequencies, allowing our brains to interpret a large spectrum of frequencies. However, the rest of our body vibrates at certain frequencies too. I don’t know exact numbers but bass tones, which are low frequencies, come very close to the ideal frequency for vibrating other parts of our body. In other words, we ‘feel’ the sound in addition to hearing it because the sound waves vibrate other parts of us, not just our eardrums. Technically, we could ‘feel’ any frequency if it is loud enough, but low frequencies are able to vibrate our skin much easier than high frequencies, and high frequencies loud enough for us to ‘feel’ them would likely destroy our eardrums.
Sounds are just waves of air so you can kinda think of sound like waves in the water. Bass is low frequency waves so you can think of them like the big waves in the water, when they hit you you can feel it move your body bc it has enough strength to do that so that should explain why you feel base. You can also hear it bc our eardrums work the same way they get moved by the waves. You can’t feel higher frequencies bc they just don’t have enough energy to push you enough for you to notice it, just like you don’t feel the tiny waves in the water.
Sound is just variations of air pressure. Like, super-fast tiny gusts of wind going back and forth. Bass and treble refers to the frequency of the sound, or how many times per second the air pressure goes back and forth. We can hear sounds that oscillate back and forth up to 20,000 times per second, or as low as 20 times per second.
Low frequency sounds require more energy to produce because you have to move a lot more air around to create them. Therefore, there is more energy associated with those waves. If they’re loud enough, you can feel the air pressure vibrations on your skin. If they’re really loud, the air pressure variations can move your hair or clothes around. Although, if that’s happening, you desperately need hearing protection.
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