If sound goes through solids more easily than air, how do foam and silicone earplugs sound instead of amplifying it when it hits your ears?
In: 9
We hear sounds based on little bones in our ears. When sound waves travel through the air our ears catch the waves and bounce them into our ear canal which amplifies the sound. Vibrating the little bones that our brains register as noise.
When you put a seal over our ear canal it stops the amplification of sound waves that are traveling in the air. So high energy sound waves say coming from a loud machine get dissipated as heat inside the ear plugs.
Having a improper seal from ear plugs can result in sound waves still coming in and damaging your ear drum which is just a thin membrane that vibrates with the bones in your ear.
They do amplify your internal sounds a lot more than external sounds. You’ll hear your own body making sounds like your breathing when you wear earplugs because it’s creating a resonating chamber inside our ears. So lower frequency sounds that our bodies make will be amplified but high frequency sounds that come from external sources are muffled because our ears are blocked from letting sound travel into our ears to get louder.
It’s actually impossible for us to make a sound proof earplugs. We can get close with electronic ones that try and cancel out frequencies of sound waves by reproducing them. But you’ll still hear sounds through the vibrations of our skulls.
Hope this was simple enough, if not I can try to TLDR it more.
Latest Answers