Why do you only hear the lower frequencies when standing outside a club/party that’s playing music?
In: Physics
Imagine a punching bag hanging from the ceiling. You slowly push and pull it. It sways a bunch with your pushing and pulling. Now, instead, you push and pull quickly. It can’t move much, because you’re just not pushing long enough for it to really get moving.
Walls behave like this punching bag, and the more they move, the more sound passes through.
It’s all to do with the sounds wave length. High pitch sounds have short wave lengths, low pitch sounds have long wave lengths. These long waves are muted far more slowly than short waves when passing through objects/walls
Lower frequency sound is not attenuated (reduced in volume) by typical construction materials as much as higher frequency sound. A reasonable way for you to understand this is that when the atoms that make up the material move in response to the sound, there is some amount of internal friction that reduces the strength of those vibrations. And of course the more frequently those atoms rub up against each other, because of higher frequency sound, the more effect that friction has.
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