What do we gain from the most common unit of sound (Db) being non linear?
In: Technology
A sound loud to enough to damage our ears is several million times more intense than the quietest sound we can hear. Most normal sounds, e.g. conversations are on the lower end of that spectrum.
It makes the numbers easier to use for humans. Having a scale from 0 to ~150 is a lot easier than having a scale from 0 to ~1000000000000000
Sound scales with distance following the inverse square law. This means sound power level decreases with (distance)^2. Logarithmic math allows us to add and subtract exponentials very easily, without having to do a lot of multiplication.
That’s how human perception works, a sound that’s 10 meters away will sound half as loud as a sound that’s one meter away. Sound also attenuate at a logarithmic rate.
Couldn’t you just google logarithmic scaling? That’s what I would do.
dB scales are used for things that have extremely large ranges. For example, in electrical engineering the frequency response of a circuit is plotted logarithmically (ie dB) because a circuits input can be anywhere between 0 and billions of hertz. How could you reasonably display graphically the performance over such a large range? The logarithmic plot requires a small amount of intuition to read but one you understand, it is a clearer depiction of the system being represented.
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