I see lots of drawings illustrating amplitude, frequency, etc using a sine wave to represent an EM wave, but why are they drawn like this? What do the crests and troughs mean/what values do they represent? And what do these waves look like in real life?
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You know how you can take a cup with two strings and pull them tight to talk to someone? What’s actually happening there is the waves, generated by your voice, hit the inside of the cup (to make it vibrate) then vibrating the string and doing the same to your friend’s cup.
The waves themselves don’t actually have to be smooth and wavy; we have ones that look like triangles, squares, circles, squiggles, and even random static. This is one way of creating different sounds.
However, the shape *does* have to have some shape to it, and here’s why.
In the cup-and-string example, the molecules in the cup/string are getting shoved back and forth to generate a sound. Our ears capture this motion and interpret it as sound.
If we had no movement (and our shape would be a straight line), we have no vibration, and thus no sound.
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