How does loudness work? I looked up what a decibel was on Wikipedia and my eyes melted. How does measuring the loudness of something work? What actually happens when we experience a sound as really loud or really quiet?
In: Physics
Sound is essentially just air being squeezed and stretched very rapidly. How quickly it switches from being squeezed to being stretched is the sound’s frequency, or whether it is low pitched or high pitched. How hard it is being squeezed is the amplitude, or volume.
When the air that is being squeezed and stretched enters your ear, it causes a part of your ear (more specifically the liquid in that part of the ear) to also be squeezed and stretched, with frequencies and amplitudes related to the air. Inside this liquid is a bunch of tiny hairs that move back and forth as the fluid is being squeezed and stretched. The more these hairs move, the more signal it sends to your brain. The more signal your brain gets, the more volume it produces.
How loud something is is essentially how much force is going through the air as sound.
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