– Why does everything sound muffled underwater if sound travels 4x faster in water?
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Water vibrate faster so your ear bones are going up be effected by all that wetness induces speedy ripples. Different moving stuff moves different, sounds different on drum inside ear hole.
It’s a lot to do with how fast your diaphragm in your ear can vibrate which increases clarity. The faster the eardrum can move the more information it can resolve. The increased viscosity of the water compared to the air reduces the sensitivity of the ear.
The speed of sound has no direct impact on its clarity. The difference of ease with which sound can pass through two different materials does, however, have a major impact. Sound struggles to travel between air and water, but can travel through either one with ease.
The premise of the question is wrong. The speed of sound has no relation to how it is attenuated. If the sound originates from underwater, it doesn’t sound muffled. For example, underwater speakers actually sound quite good. While scuba diving, if you tap your diving knife on your tank to get another diver’s attention, it makes a clear ringing sound.
The interface between water and air does attenuate sound. Water is much more dense than air, so vibrations in air molecules are not able to induce the same vibrations in water.
Why is it hard to see with a bright light shining in your eyes?
Also our ears were designed to detect vibrations in air, not water. If we had evolved in the water like a shark we would have wicked good hearing underwater.
For the eardrum to work properly there needs to be air on both sides so it can vibrate with each sound. When you’re underwater the water prevents the eardrum from vibrating normally and the result is the muffled sounds.
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When you put your head underwater, a bubble of air will be trapped in your ear. Sound has to travel through the water, pass from the water into the air, and then pass from the air to the ear’s diaphragm. Each of these passages is imperfect and sound is weakened and distorted.
Sound that originates in air sounds muffled underwear because water is denser than air and it’s hard for the air molecules to transfer their vibration to the water.
Sound that originates underwater sounds quite clear underwater (and contrary to what some comments theorize our ears work perfectly well underwater). You can experience this in pool with underwater speakers.
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