Discuss three factors that affect speed of sound

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Physics

Karlee English

8 November, 18:08

Discuss three factors that affect speed of sound

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Mallory Davies · Answer 1

The Medium

When you pluck a guitar string, it begins to vibrate from side to side. This is what it would look like in slow motion. Let's pretend these are the air particles that are evenly distributed around the guitar and everywhere else. When the string moves to the right, like this, it pushes on the air particles and makes them press together. This is called a compression.

Air particles being pressed together is called compression.

The Speed of Sound

Let's go back to the different mediums that sound can travel through. We said that sound waves travel through solids, liquids, and gases. They can travel through all states of matter. But do the waves travel the same way through each of these different substances?

How closely the particles are to each other affects the strength of their interaction.

We know that a solid has its particles packed very tightly together. Liquid particles are more loosely packed, and particles in a gas are pretty far apart. The distance between the particles affects how strong the interactions are between them. This, in turn, affects how quickly they transfer the energy of the wave. The stronger the particle interactions are, the more quickly the wave is transferred. So in general, sound travels faster in solids than in liquids, and faster in liquids than in gas.

Temperature actually increases the speed of sound, because warmer particles generally move at a faster rate. Scientists have derived a special formula for finding the speed of sound in dry air. It works for most of the temperatures found on Earth. The formula is v = 331 + (0.61) T, where v is the speed of sound, and T is the temperature.

For this formula, speed must be measured in meters per second, and temperature in degrees Celsius. You can see by this formula that an increase in temperature, or T, would cause an increase in speed, or v. If the temperature was 20° C, then the speed of sound in dry air would be about 343 meters per second. If the temperature rose to 30° C, then the speed would increase to 349 meters per second