An audio speaker producing a steady sound at an outdoor concert is 24 ft away from you. If you move to a position where the speaker is 85 ft distant, by what factor will the amplitude of the sound change

Question

Physics

Keenan Cobb

28 March, 09:45

An audio speaker producing a steady sound at an outdoor concert is 24 ft away from you. If you move to a position where the speaker is 85 ft distant, by what factor will the amplitude of the sound change

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Answers (1)

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Kathy Hodges · Answer 1

Sound is one of those phenomena whose intensity varies as the inverse square of the distance from the source.

If you're 24-ft from the source and you move to 85-ft from the source, you would expect the sound you hear to get softer, and its intensity to change by a factor of

(24/85) ² = 0.0797 ...

So the sound becomes roughly 8% as loud as it was originally.

(The sound intensity has been reduced by 10.98 dB.)