Why is it that during loud concerts you feel the bass in your chest but not the higher notes despite them being the same volume.
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Higher frequencies lose energy much quicker and are absorbed by things they come into contact with. The lower the frequency the further it will travel with less energy loss and the sound waves will be more likely to bounce off objects they come into contact with.
Also, the wavelength of the bass is longer and is coming from larger speakers which is compressing more air particles in your direction.
Sound is just air vibrating back and forth at different speeds. Higher pitch notes vibrate the air much faster than bass notes, which vibrate the air slowly.
Some loud bass notes vibrate the air slowly and powerfully enough that the air moving can also move your body, and you can’t stop it.
It’s the same idea as singers breaking a wine glass by hitting that really high note, except on the low end.
The real reason it’s that a low frequency wave (100-300 Khz) has to be much more powerful than a high pitch wave (15Khz) to appear the same volume.
Vibration from subwoofers can disrupt your heart rate and is extremely dangerous for loud music lovers
Most of the human body structure is set to resonate at lower (or bass) frequencies. That proximity to resonance is what makes your chest vibrate.
It is also true that we can perceive low frequencies more easily, than high frequencies. That is just how our brain works.
There are 2 factors at play. 1) hearing and 2) feeling.
Sound is difference in air pressure that is traveling. For ELI5 purposes we could exaggerate and observe it from your standing / listening position as wind blowing in your chest for 1s and in your back the next and so forth.
1) for your brain and listening sensor (ear drum) to hear sound the direction of the wind must change between 20 times / second to 20.000 times / second. That gets picked up and interpreted as sound.
2) to feel the sound there are 2 factors at play. Your sense of feel and your body resonance.
As you can feel the wind on your skin mostly with the help of your body hair so you can extremely low and loud (powerful) sound as it can push back and forward your hair. And to understand resonance in general: imagine being on a swing as a kid. When you time your balance just right with leaning backwards and forwards you produce movement. But you have to time it right, catching the resonance. If you lean forward and backwards 10x per second the swing will not move.
Now your body is ful of systems that eatch have theyr own resonance (a frequency of change in air pressure that it responds to). That goes for your hair, the air-chamber that are your lungs, your guts etc. Why you can feel the bas is because your body parts resonance is within bass range 0-200 hz (my wild gess, i dont know the number exactly) high tunes change airpressure more than 1000 times per second thus like you being on a swing mooving balance back and forth too quickly. You put in a lot of work but no result, thuss no feeling.
Hope i didnt get to complicated for an ELI5!
There’s something called a sympathetic vibration, or resonance. Have you ever been making a noise that caused something nearby to rattle? Every object has its own frequency of vibration, and if sound waves hit it at that frequency (and sometimes at .5x or 2x or other related frequencies), it will start to vibrate. It’s the reason why a kazoo makes noise when you hum (the little paper vibrates at a lot of frequencies) but not when you blow.
This effect can be as wide ranging as a window rattling when you play bass to entire buildings designed to inhibit or enhance different vibrations (remember that an earthquake is a vibration).
Your chest has a relatively low frequency. If you hum as low as you can, you might even be able to test the range for yourself. Similarly, if you hum higher notes, you might feel the resonance in your skull and sinus cavities.
Bass is like getting hit with a 10ft wave. Higher notes are like if someone splashed some water 10ft in the air at you. (Pretending height is volume, and the waves length is wavelength/freq This isn’t that correct, but neither is high school chemistry so whatever)
Lower notes have wider wavelengths, higher notes have shorter wavelengths.
Sound waves physically move air. Our ears work sort of like little “cup and string” telephones, sound waves physically move a little wire in out ear that converts it to electrical signals for out brain to percieve.
A low-note sound wave is like a big wave in a pool – it will move you along with it. A high-note sound wave is like a small ripple in the pool, you can physically feel it, but it wont move you in the water. Its the same for sound except sound is smashing the air around us into us harder.
Imagine standing on a beach about waist deep in the ocean. High frequencies are the small little ripple waves on the water that you see but don’t really feel. Low frequencies are the big waves that come and knock you on ass.
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